Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 3°43' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:22 (PDT) – 3 hours and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 37° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:30.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. The trio will lie in the constellation Leo.

They 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 Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 10h47m00s 13°07'N Leo -10.6 32'49"0
Venus 10h42m00s 9°36'N Leo -3.9 10"2
Jupiter 10h41m00s 9°17'N Leo -1.8 31"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Aug 2026

The sky on 8 August 2026
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:46
Twilight ends
21:19
Twilight begins
04:32


Waning Crescent

13%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:43 11:44 18:45
Venus 09:47 15:47 21:46
Moon 01:20 08:58 16:37
Mars 02:22 09:34 16:46
Jupiter 05:30 12:26 19:22
Saturn 22:29 04:40 10:52
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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