Close approach of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 46.4 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:25 (PDT) – 3 hours and 7 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:59.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.2; and Mars will be at mag 0.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They 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.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mars 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
Jupiter 20h42m50s 18°34'S Capricornus -2.2 35"6
Mars 20h43m40s 19°19'S Capricornus 0.8 6"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Jun 2026

The sky on 10 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
03:53


Waning Crescent

20%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:18 14:33 21:48
Venus 08:21 15:30 22:40
Moon 02:03 08:34 15:15
Mars 03:44 10:33 17:21
Jupiter 08:21 15:25 22:30
Saturn 02:15 08:26 14:36
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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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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