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, Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°50' of each other. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:19 (PDT), 16° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 43 minutes after the Sun at 21:45.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9; Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. 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.

At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

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 09h46m50s 13°09'N Leo -9.9 33'09"9
Venus 09h50m00s 14°49'N Leo -3.9 12"1
Uranus 09h48m10s 14°00'N Leo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Mar 2026

The sky on 16 March 2026
Sunrise
06:59
Sunset
19:00
Twilight ends
20:23
Twilight begins
05:35

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:08 11:53 17:39
Venus 07:48 14:01 20:15
Moon 05:48 11:12 16:44
Mars 06:25 12:05 17:45
Jupiter 13:07 20:17 03:27
Saturn 07:28 13:29 19:30
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 Feb 2046  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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