Conjunction of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 34' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:06 (PDT) – 1 hour and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:16.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 15h27m30s 17°04'S Libra -8.6 29'39"0
Venus 15h27m30s 17°39'S Libra -3.9 10"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jul 2026

The sky on 11 July 2026
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
04:04


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 13:01 19:52
Venus 09:14 15:50 22:26
Moon 02:35 10:08 17:45
Mars 02:56 10:02 17:07
Jupiter 06:50 13:51 20:51
Saturn 00:18 06:30 12:42
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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