The planets Mars and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°09' of each other.
From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:10 (PDT), 46° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:02, 55° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:05, when they sink below 11° above your western horizon.
Mars will be at mag -0.6; and Saturn will be at mag 0.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 | 00h12m30s | 0°58'N | Pisces | -0.6 | 11"8 |
| Saturn | 00h16m30s | 0°56'S | Pisces | 0.6 | 18"3 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 109° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.
The sky on 1 Jul 2026
| The sky on 1 July 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
95% 17 days old |
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.
Related news
| 01 Oct 2114 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 08 Dec 2114 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 06 Aug 2115 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 15 Oct 2115 | – Saturn 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.