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°16' to the north 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 20:20, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:17, 47° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:57, 11° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7 in the constellation Pisces, and Jupiter at mag -2.9 in the neighbouring constellation of 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 22h53m00s 2°21'S Pisces -12.7 32'15"4
Jupiter 22h53m00s 8°37'S Aquarius -2.9 48"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 169° from the Sun, which is in Leo 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.

Related news

06 Jul 2140  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
04 Sep 2140  –  Jupiter at opposition
01 Nov 2140  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Aug 2141  –  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.

Share