The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°11' of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:14 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 62° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:00.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.1; and Mars will be at mag 0.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mars 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 09h52m00s 13°43'N Leo -2.1 36"6
Mars 09h53m20s 14°51'N Leo 0.7 7"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 87° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Nov 2026

The sky on 15 November 2026
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
16:33
Twilight ends
18:09
Twilight begins
05:02

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

41%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:04 10:28 15:52
Venus 04:07 09:35 15:03
Moon 11:57 16:46 21:43
Mars 23:10 06:07 13:04
Jupiter 23:14 06:06 12:59
Saturn 14:40 20:46 02:52
All times shown in EST.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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