Look up the next 10 days to see a brilliant dance of the brightest planets in the evening sky.
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Social media pages (primarily the Ai pages, which everyone else then picks up on) like to claim a lot of things. Once-in-a-lifetime planetary alignments; giant comets every other week; smiley face moons making perfect triangles with planets; red moons and solar eclipses when no such phenomenon is happening for years. Stuff that drives clicks and comments to generate easy money for the page owner who owns a bot farm in some warehouse halfway around the world.
But wait! This time, there’s a really cool thing actually happening in the sky.
If you’ve visited me at any point in 2026, you saw Jupiter and its Galilean Moons in my telescope! By March, Venus rose high enough over the sunset, several times brighter than Jupiter.
A little more than a week ago, the Moon joined their ensemble, setting the stage for their final dance: a tango in the western sky.
BUT FIRST–THE BLUE MOON
We can’t jump ahead 10 days without first talking about the less-impressive but still going to be talked about everywhere…Blue Moon.
It’s the kind of Blue Moon that’s not mathematically relevant, and only exists because human-created months are 30-31 days long.
May 31st @ 4:45am Eastern (1:45am Pacific) is the next Full Moon. And because the last Full Moon was on May 1st, that makes two Full Moons in the month of May. Which sounds cool! But…it’s all a consequence of choosing to have 12 months at 30-31 days long.
The Moon orbits the Earth every 27.3 days, but because Earth orbits the Sun and slightly changes the angle, the Moon has to orbit slightly more to return to the same phase. This means one Full Moon to the next is 29.5 days, meaning every single month can have two Full Moons–except February, because even on a leap year, February is still half-a-day short of a lunar phase cycle.
This is the popular definition of a Blue Moon. It sounds cool, but in my opinion, it isn’t, because months are arbitrary and don’t have to be 30-31 days. We could have chosen no months. Two months. 20 months. In fact, prior to Julius and August Caesar, there were only 10 months established by Rome. “Monthly” Blue Moons are a consequence of human timekeeping, and that’s it.
The other type of Blue Moon, which is more mathematically sound, is the “Seasonal” Blue Moon.
Earth’s seasons are roughly 91 days long. If you multiply 29.5 x 3, you get 88.5 days. So, mathematically, seasons always have three Full Moons.
However, if a Full Moon occurs within the first three days of a season, you can squeeze in a fourth Full Moon. When this occurs, we decided to call the third of four Full Moons the Blue Moon.
I’m not one to celebrate it, but I prefer this definition because it’s a mathematical feature of Earth’s and the Moon’s orbits, not an arbitrary measure of human timekeeping.
The Tango of Jupiter & Venus
Back to the main event!
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen me posting about Venus and Jupiter the past several days, but now we’re in the final stretch! After sunset and the sky gets a little darker, look to the west. You’ll see two bright dots. Venus is the bottom, Jupiter is the top.
Over the next 10 days, they will get super close together, and then, on June 8th – 10th, they’ll pass each other and switch sides in the sky. After June 10th, Venus will be the upper dot, and Jupiter will be the lower dot.
This conjunction happens roughly once per year, and about 50% of the time during pre-dawn hours. But the conjunctions have to be far enough away from the Sun in order to be visible; too close, and the glare hides them.
The last time a Jupiter/Venus conjunction was visible during evening hours being March 1, 2023.
The next time this happens in the evening, while being visible, will be September 5th – 8th, 2029, right after sunset.
Where will I be?
Starting tonight (May 28th), I’ll be in Sedona, Arizona for free sidewalk astronomy from about 7pm – 9:30pm each night through June 6th. After that, I head to San Diego from June 8th – 10th, which will have a perfect view of the conjunction across a flat horizon (with buildings at Seaport Village interrupting right at the very end of the night).
Make sure to come out and use my telescope for free as we watch the two planets dance! While we won’t be able to see them in the eyepiece at the same time (too far apart!) Jupiter’s moons always put on a show–and hey, bring binoculars for closer views of them together.
Be sure to check out my USA Tour Dates to find out where I’ll be the rest of the year, and lookout for more upcoming astronomical events.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
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