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 4°58' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 16:58 (PDT), 31° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 27 minutes after the Sun at 20:08.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h26m50s 10°55'S Capricornus -10.8 32'37"7
Jupiter 21h26m50s 15°53'S Capricornus -2.1 33"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Aug 2026

The sky on 5 August 2026
Sunrise
06:03
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:23
Twilight begins
04:28


Waning Crescent

47%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:36 11:38 18:39
Venus 09:45 15:48 21:51
Moon 23:06 06:02 13:07
Mars 02:25 09:37 16:49
Jupiter 05:39 12:35 19:31
Saturn 22:40 04:52 11:04
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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