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 5°13' to the south of 136199 Eris.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:18 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 66° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:56.

Mars will be at mag -0.5, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.3, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h23m20s 11°25'N Aries -0.5 11"5
136199 Eris 02h23m20s 16°38'N Aries 18.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 97° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Aug 2026

The sky on 18 August 2026
Sunrise
06:13
Sunset
19:35
Twilight ends
21:05
Twilight begins
04:42


Waxing Crescent

44%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:28 12:20 19:11
Venus 09:55 15:41 21:27
Moon 12:31 17:40 22:43
Mars 02:11 09:23 16:35
Jupiter 05:01 11:55 18:49
Saturn 21:49 04:00 10:11
All times shown in PDT.

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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31 Oct 2084  –  136199 Eris at opposition
01 Nov 2085  –  136199 Eris at opposition
01 Nov 2086  –  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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