Close approach of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°15' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:10 (PDT), 46° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:08.

Saturn will be at mag -0.1; and Mars will be at mag 1.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn 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
Saturn 06h02m00s 22°43'N Gemini -0.1 17"5
Mars 06h02m10s 24°58'N Gemini 1.4 4"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 59° from the Sun, which is in Aries 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

21%

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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14 Mar 1975  –  Saturn 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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