Conjunction of Saturn and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 54' to the south of Neptune.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 17° above the horizon at dusk.

Saturn will be at mag 1.0, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and Neptune around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Saturn 00h02m50s 2°01'S Pisces 1.0 16"1
Neptune 00h02m50s 1°06'S Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Feb 2026

The sky on 15 February 2026
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
17:15
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:21 13:01 18:42
Venus 07:11 12:35 17:59
Moon 05:58 10:31 15:12
Mars 06:23 11:24 16:25
Jupiter 13:33 21:07 04:42
Saturn 08:08 14:03 19:59
All times shown in EST.

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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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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