Conjunction of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 2°03' to the north of Uranus.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:44, when they reach an altitude of 20° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:41, 49° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:43, 46° above your southern horizon.

Mars will be at mag 0.3, and Uranus at mag 5.4, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and Uranus 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 13h09m50s 4°39'S Virgo 0.3 8"5
Uranus 13h09m50s 6°42'S Virgo 5.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 106° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2026

The sky on 17 July 2026
Sunrise
05:50
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
04:09


Waxing Crescent

15%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:31 12:23 19:15
Venus 09:23 15:51 22:19
Moon 09:36 16:04 22:22
Mars 02:48 09:56 17:03
Jupiter 06:33 13:32 20:32
Saturn 23:55 06:07 12:19
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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23 Jun 2140  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
28 Jan 2141  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion

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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