The planets Mars and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 5.2 arcminutes of each other.
From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:32 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 39° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:55.
Mars will be at mag 0.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.
They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or 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 Mars and Saturn 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 |
| Mars | 00h11m30s | 1°12'S | Pisces | 0.2 | 8"2 |
| Saturn | 00h11m30s | 1°08'S | Pisces | 0.8 | 17"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 18 Aug 2026
| The sky on 18 August 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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44% 6 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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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Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.