Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 30.6 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:32 (PDT), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:49.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

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 15h55m30s 19°42'S Libra -2.2 37"1
Uranus 15h54m50s 20°11'S Libra 5.6 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 92° from the Sun, which is in Leo 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

30%

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.

Related news

09 Aug 2066  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
14 Mar 2067  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
29 May 2067  –  Uranus at opposition
14 Aug 2067  –  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.

Share