Conjunction of Mars and Eris

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and 136199 Eris will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°53' to the north of 136199 Eris.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:07 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 62° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:03.

Mars will be at mag -0.9, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.5, both in the constellation Pisces.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and 136199 Eris 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
Mars 02h03m50s 9°04'N Pisces -0.9 13"7
136199 Eris 02h03m50s 7°10'N Pisces 18.5 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 107° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Mar 2026

The sky on 23 March 2026
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:25


Waxing Crescent

30%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 11:27 17:08
Venus 07:42 14:06 20:29
Moon 09:41 17:12 00:49
Mars 06:12 11:58 17:43
Jupiter 12:41 19:50 03:00
Saturn 07:03 13:05 19:07
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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24 Oct 2054  –  136199 Eris 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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