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

Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 50' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:01 (PDT) – 2 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:13.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair 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.

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 09h10m10s 17°42'N Cancer -9.9 32'17"6
Jupiter 09h10m10s 16°52'N Cancer -1.8 31"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2026

The sky on 8 September 2026
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:09
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:02

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

4%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:20 13:29 19:38
Venus 09:59 15:20 20:41
Moon 03:39 10:50 17:51
Mars 01:50 09:00 16:09
Jupiter 04:01 10:52 17:42
Saturn 20:24 02:34 08:44
All times shown in PDT.

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 Dec 2026  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Feb 2027  –  Jupiter at opposition
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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Los Angeles

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34.05°N
118.24°W
PDT

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