Conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 35' to the north of Neptune.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible between 18:25 and 04:16. They will become accessible at around 18:25, when they rise to an altitude of 21° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:21, 71° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 04:16 when they sink below 21° above your western horizon.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.9, and Neptune at mag 7.8, both in the constellation Aries.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 03h10m00s 16°25'N Aries -2.9 48"1
Neptune 03h10m00s 15°50'N Aries 7.8 2"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 176° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Mar 2026

The sky on 18 March 2026
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:01
Twilight ends
20:25
Twilight begins
05:32


Waxing Crescent

0%

0 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:00 11:44 17:28
Venus 07:46 14:02 20:19
Moon 06:44 12:45 18:55
Mars 06:22 12:03 17:44
Jupiter 13:00 20:09 03:19
Saturn 07:21 13:22 19:24
All times shown in PDT.

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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26 Aug 2048  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
13 Nov 2048  –  Neptune at opposition

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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