The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 1°36' of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:40 (EST), 21° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 30 minutes after the Sun at 22:49.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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.

At around the same time, the pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 07h51m00s 23°02'N Gemini -4.0 13"9
Jupiter 07h49m40s 21°28'N Gemini -1.9 31"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jun 2026

The sky on 9 June 2026
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:19
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
02:52

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

29%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 14:24 22:07
Venus 07:46 15:21 22:57
Moon 01:23 07:33 13:56
Mars 03:22 10:26 17:30
Jupiter 07:53 15:21 22:49
Saturn 02:09 08:22 14:36
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 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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12 Apr 2027  –  Jupiter ends 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.

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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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