Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°04' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 17 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:31, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:53, 36° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:34, 14° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7 in the constellation Scorpius, and Jupiter at mag -2.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Libra.

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

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter 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 15h58m20s 25°29'S Scorpius -12.7 33'00"8
Jupiter 15h58m20s 19°24'S Libra -2.5 43"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 161° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jul 2026

The sky on 15 July 2026
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
04:07


Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 12:35 19:26
Venus 09:20 15:51 22:21
Moon 07:16 14:23 21:20
Mars 02:51 09:58 17:04
Jupiter 06:39 13:38 20:38
Saturn 00:03 06:14 12:26
All times shown in PDT.

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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24 Apr 2138  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion

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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