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

Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 9.5 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:24 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 45° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:35.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 the Moon 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
The Moon 09h31m20s 15°29'N Leo -10.9 31'52"9
Jupiter 09h31m00s 15°20'N Leo -1.9 32"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Oct 2026

The sky on 6 October 2026
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
18:26
Twilight ends
19:58
Twilight begins
05:20

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

15%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:04 14:08 19:12
Venus 09:18 14:03 18:47
Moon 02:14 09:29 16:31
Mars 01:02 08:21 15:39
Jupiter 02:24 09:23 16:22
Saturn 18:28 00:37 06:46
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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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