Conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 47' to the south of Neptune.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dawn.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.9, and Neptune at mag 8.0, 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 through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Neptune 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
Jupiter 18h15m20s 23°04'S Sagittarius -1.9 33"1
Neptune 18h15m20s 22°16'S Sagittarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Jul 2026

The sky on 26 July 2026
Sunrise
05:56
Sunset
19:57
Twilight ends
21:35
Twilight begins
04:18


Waxing Gibbous

94%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:46 11:43 18:40
Venus 09:34 15:50 22:07
Moon 18:25 23:07 03:51
Mars 02:37 09:47 16:57
Jupiter 06:07 13:05 20:03
Saturn 23:20 05:32 11:43
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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