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 9°38' to the south of 136199 Eris.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 18:30 (PDT), 65° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:05.

Mars will be at mag 0.8, and 136199 Eris at mag 17.9, 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 02h41m30s 16°48'N Aries 0.8 6"4
136199 Eris 02h41m30s 26°26'N Aries 17.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2026

The sky on 2 July 2026
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waning Gibbous

91%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:02 13:56 20:50
Venus 09:00 15:47 22:34
Moon 21:45 02:49 07:58
Mars 03:09 10:10 17:12
Jupiter 07:16 14:18 21:20
Saturn 00:52 07:04 13:16
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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