The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°16' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 16 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 between 20:49 and 05:04. They will become accessible at around 20:49, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:56, 32° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:04 when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.
The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.6, both in the constellation Sagittarius.
The pair 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.
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 | 18h06m20s | 27°26'S | Sagittarius | -12.7 | 32'48"9 |
| Jupiter | 18h06m20s | 23°09'S | Sagittarius | -2.6 | 45"5 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 175° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 16 Jul 2026
| The sky on 16 July 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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7% 2 days 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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| 30 May 2139 | – 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.