The planets Venus, Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°41' of each other.
From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 18:10 (PDT), 31° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 6 minutes after the Sun at 20:46.
Venus will be at mag -4.1; Saturn will be at mag 0.5; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 Venus and Saturn 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 |
| Venus | 01h20m00s | 8°50'N | Pisces | -4.1 | 15"5 |
| Saturn | 01h24m40s | 6°24'N | Pisces | 0.5 | 16"5 |
| Mars | 01h23m00s | 8°48'N | Pisces | 1.3 | 4"7 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.
The sky on 13 Aug 2026
| The sky on 13 August 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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5% 1 day 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.