Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 23.4 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dawn.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible 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 Jupiter and Uranus 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
Jupiter 07h14m10s 22°20'N Gemini -1.9 32"3
Uranus 07h14m30s 22°43'N Gemini 5.7 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jul 2026

The sky on 5 July 2026
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waning Gibbous

67%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:47 13:39 20:32
Venus 09:05 15:48 22:32
Moon 23:11 05:01 10:58
Mars 03:05 10:08 17:10
Jupiter 07:07 14:09 21:10
Saturn 00:41 06:53 13:04
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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