Venus, Jupiter and M44 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 32.3 arcminutes of each other.
From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:23 (PDT) – 2 hours and 54 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:02.
Venus will be at mag -4.0; Jupiter will be at mag -1.8; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. The trio will lie in the constellation Cancer.
They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.
At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.
A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter 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 |
| Venus | 08h39m00s | 18°17'N | Cancer | -4.0 | 13"5 |
| Jupiter | 08h39m20s | 18°49'N | Cancer | -1.8 | 31"4 |
| M44 | 08h40m20s | 19°40'N | Cancer | 3.1 | 108'36"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
The sky on 19 Aug 2026
| The sky on 19 August 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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52% 7 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.