Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 33' to the north of Jupiter.

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 dawn sky, rising at 04:35 (PDT) – 1 hour and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:06.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Venus 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
Venus 19h59m40s 20°15'S Sagittarius -4.0 13"1
Jupiter 19h59m40s 20°48'S Sagittarius -1.9 32"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jul 2026

The sky on 16 July 2026
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:44
Twilight begins
04:08


Waxing Crescent

11%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:29 19:20
Venus 09:21 15:51 22:20
Moon 08:28 15:16 21:53
Mars 02:50 09:57 17:04
Jupiter 06:36 13:35 20:35
Saturn 23:59 06:11 12:22
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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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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