Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 41.2 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:58 (PDT) – 3 hours and 53 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:49.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

They 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.

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 Uranus 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 16h07m40s 20°04'S Scorpius -1.9 32"7
Uranus 16h07m10s 20°44'S Scorpius 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Apr 2026

The sky on 11 April 2026
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
19:19
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
04:57


Waning Crescent

31%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:18 17:09
Venus 07:31 14:19 21:08
Moon 03:12 08:15 13:23
Mars 05:36 11:38 17:39
Jupiter 11:32 18:41 01:51
Saturn 05:55 11:59 18:03
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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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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