What planet is next to the Moon tonight?

Why planets keep turning up next to the Moon

The Moon, the Sun and all the planets travel along almost the same line in the sky, the ecliptic. It is the plane of the Earth's orbit seen edge on, and because the solar system formed from a flat, spinning disc, every planet orbits within a few degrees of that plane. The Moon's orbit is tilted only about 5 degrees to it. So the Moon spends its whole month crossing the same strip of sky the planets live in, the band of the zodiac constellations.

The Moon is also the fastest thing in that strip. It moves about 13 degrees a day eastward against the stars, roughly its own width every hour, and laps the whole sky in 27.3 days. The planets crawl by comparison: Jupiter takes 12 years to go round, Saturn 29. So once a month the Moon catches up with each planet, passes it, and moves on. A bright planet sitting beside the Moon is not a rare event. What changes is how close they come and whether you can see them in a dark sky.

How close they get

Because the Moon's orbit is tilted 5 degrees, it can pass a planet anywhere from a fraction of a degree to about 10 degrees away. The exact gap depends on where the Moon is in its 18.6-year cycle of the nodes (the two points where its orbit crosses the ecliptic). At times in that cycle the Moon passes straight over the same planets and stars month after month, which brings a season of occultations.

The gap also depends on where you are. The Moon is so close that observers in different countries see it shifted against the background by up to about two Moon widths. That is why this page works out the pair for your own city and why published conjunction times, usually given for the centre of the Earth, can differ from what you see by a degree.

Why some pairings never get seen

A conjunction only matters if it happens in a dark sky. When the Moon is near new it sits close to the Sun and is lost in the glare, so its passes of Mercury and Venus are often invisible. Around full moon it is opposite the Sun and rises at sunset, so pairings then are visible all night but washed out by moonlight for fainter stars. The best shows are a crescent Moon with Venus or Jupiter in twilight, which is when you get the famous "smile" photographs.

Occultations: when the Moon hides a planet or star

Sometimes the Moon passes directly in front of a planet or star and blocks it from view. A star vanishes in an instant, because it is a point of light; a planet fades out over several seconds as the Moon's edge crosses its disc. Watching the dark edge of a waxing Moon slide over a bright star in a small telescope is one of the most striking sights in amateur astronomy.

Only four first-magnitude stars lie close enough to the ecliptic to be covered: Regulus, Spica, Antares and Aldebaran. Occultations come in seasons. A series of monthly occultations of Antares runs from 2023 to 2028, and the Moon is also covering Regulus month after month through 2026. In late 2026 the Moon reaches Jupiter too: it hid the planet on 6 October 2026, does so again on 2 November 2026 for parts of Southeast Asia and Australia, and the series continues until May 2027. Each event is seen only from part of the Earth, so the list above checks every one against your own location.

We cross-checked these series against published predictions before listing them; the times shown for your city are calculated, and they can be a minute or two off at the edge of an occultation's path, where the Moon's mountains and valleys matter.

Planet or star? How to tell what is next to the Moon

• Steady or twinkling. Stars twinkle because they are points of light bent by moving air. Planets show a tiny disc, so their light averages out and stays steady. The difference is clearest low in the sky.
• Brightness. Venus (about magnitude -4) and Jupiter (about -2) outshine every star at night. If the point beside the Moon is the brightest thing in that part of the sky, it is almost certainly one of them.
• Colour. Mars is orange-red. Saturn is a soft gold. Aldebaran and Antares are orange too, which makes them easy to mix up with Mars: the name Antares means "rival of Mars".
• Binoculars. Jupiter shows up to four moons in a row beside it. Venus may show a crescent in a small telescope. Stars stay points at any magnification.
• The next night. A star next to the Moon keeps its place relative to other stars. A planet drifts slowly over weeks. The Moon itself moves about 13 degrees eastward by the next evening, so the pair will have split up.

How to read the diagram and the numbers

The picture at the top is drawn to angular scale, the way angles look on the sky. The dashed circles are 5 and 10 degrees from the Moon. Hold out your fist at arm's length: it covers about 10 degrees, the length of the orange scale bar. A thumb width is about 2 degrees, and the Moon is half a degree. "Above" and "left" are for the time shown; as the night goes on the whole pair turns as it moves west across the sky, so a planet that starts above the Moon in the evening may be off to one side by the time it sets.

The "both up after dark" times are when the Sun is at least 6 degrees below the horizon and both objects are at least 5 degrees up. Mercury and Venus never stray far from the Sun, so they are only ever seen in twilight, low in the west after sunset or low in the east before sunrise.

Brightness in magnitudes

Magnitude is the astronomer's brightness scale, and smaller numbers are brighter. The Moon at full is about -12.7, Venus around -4, Jupiter about -2 to -3, Mars between about -2 and +1.8 depending on how close it is, Saturn around +0.5 to +1, and the bright stars near the Moon's path between about +0.5 and +1.6. From a city you can see down to roughly magnitude +3 or +4, so every object on this page is easy to see when it is out of the twilight.

Tips for seeing and photographing a Moon-planet pair

• Go early for a crescent Moon. A thin evening crescent sets soon after the Sun, so look 30 to 60 minutes after sunset with a clear view to the west.
• Use a phone on a support. Rest it on a wall or tripod, tap to focus on the Moon and slide the exposure down until the Moon is not a white blob. The planet will still show.
• Add a foreground. A tree, a roofline or a hill makes a pair look dramatic. A longer lens from further back makes the Moon look bigger next to the foreground.
• Look for earthshine. On a crescent, the dark part of the Moon glows faintly with sunlight reflected off the Earth, which looks lovely next to a bright planet.

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