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 8°24' to the south of 136199 Eris.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:07 (PDT) – 3 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:23.

Mars will be at mag 1.0, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.1, 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 02h36m40s 14°17'N Aries 1.0 5"2
136199 Eris 02h36m40s 22°41'N Aries 18.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 51° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Jun 2026

The sky on 21 June 2026
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

50%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:29 14:33 21:37
Venus 08:41 15:40 22:40
Moon 12:53 18:55 00:48
Mars 03:26 10:21 17:17
Jupiter 07:48 14:51 21:55
Saturn 01:34 07:45 13:56
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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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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