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 5°35' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 24 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 dawn sky, rising at 02:43 (PDT) – 3 hours and 3 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:29.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h50m40s 2°46'S Aquarius -11.4 32'12"5
Jupiter 22h50m40s 8°21'S Aquarius -2.3 36"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2026

The sky on 17 July 2026
Sunrise
05:50
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
04:09


Waxing Crescent

16%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:31 12:23 19:15
Venus 09:23 15:51 22:19
Moon 09:36 16:04 22:22
Mars 02:48 09:56 17:03
Jupiter 06:33 13:32 20:32
Saturn 23:55 06:07 12:19
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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