The Moon, Mars and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 5°27' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.
From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:11 (PDT) – 3 hours and 59 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:42.
The Moon will be at mag -11.8; Mars will be at mag 0.3; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.
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 | 19h58m30s | 16°11'S | Sagittarius | -11.8 | 29'58"2 |
| Mars | 20h04m20s | 21°29'S | Sagittarius | 0.3 | 8"1 |
| Neptune | 20h00m30s | 20°04'S | Sagittarius | 7.9 | 2"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 87° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.
The sky on 4 Aug 2026
| The sky on 4 August 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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59% 21 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.