Close approach of the Moon, Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Mars and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 17.0 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:31 (PDT), 18° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 19 minutes after the Sun at 22:06.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Mars will be at mag 1.5; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 11h49m00s 1°28'N Virgo -10.7 31'35"8
Mars 11h49m10s 1°45'N Virgo 1.5 4"6
Uranus 11h49m50s 1°52'N Virgo 5.5 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Jul 2026

The sky on 14 July 2026
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
04:06


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:50 12:41 19:33
Venus 09:18 15:50 22:23
Moon 06:00 13:25 20:40
Mars 02:52 09:59 17:05
Jupiter 06:42 13:41 20:41
Saturn 00:06 06:18 12:30
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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