Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°19' to the north of Neptune.
From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 21:07 (PDT), 32° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 57 minutes after the Sun at 23:53.
Mars will be at mag 1.5, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Cancer.
The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.
A graph of the angular separation between Mars and Neptune 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 | 09h10m30s | 17°45'N | Cancer | 1.5 | 4"9 |
| Neptune | 09h10m30s | 16°26'N | Cancer | 7.9 | 2"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 60° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 5 May 2026
| The sky on 5 May 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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82% 18 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.