The Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°38' of each other. The Moon will be 2 days old.
From South El Monte , the quartet will become visible at around 18:51 (PDT), 13° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 28 minutes after the Sun at 20:03.
The Moon will be at mag -10.0; Venus will be at mag -4.0; Jupiter will be at mag -1.7; and Mars will be at mag 1.5. The quartet will lie in the constellation Virgo.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.
At around the same time, the quartet will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.
A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the quartet at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 14h08m10s | 16°18'S | Virgo | -10.0 | 32'42"4 |
| Venus | 14h11m10s | 13°45'S | Virgo | -4.0 | 13"7 |
| Jupiter | 14h15m10s | 12°31'S | Virgo | -1.7 | 30"8 |
| Mars | 14h14m50s | 13°42'S | Virgo | 1.5 | 4"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The quartet will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.
The sky on 14 Jul 2026
| The sky on 14 July 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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2% 1 day old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.