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 Woking however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will lie so far south that they will never rise more than 17° above the horizon.

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 15 Jun 2026

The sky on 15 June 2026
Sunrise
04:42
Sunset
21:19
Twilight ends
--:--
Twilight begins
--:--


Waxing Crescent

0%

0 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:33 14:47 23:01
Venus 07:41 15:45 23:49
Moon 04:24 13:25 22:23
Mars 03:02 10:38 18:13
Jupiter 07:20 15:21 23:22
Saturn 02:00 08:19 14:37
All times shown in BST.

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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09 Aug 2066  –  Uranus 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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