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

Close approach of Saturn and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Saturn and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 31.9 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:30 (PDT) – 3 hours and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 33° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:21.

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Saturn will be at mag 0.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible 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 Saturn and Uranus 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
Saturn 07h55m50s 20°43'N Gemini 0.1 17"1
Uranus 07h56m10s 21°14'N Gemini 5.6 3"6

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

The sky on 6 Jul 2026

The sky on 6 July 2026
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00

22-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

56%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 13:33 20:25
Venus 09:06 15:49 22:31
Moon 23:37 05:44 11:59
Mars 03:03 10:07 17:10
Jupiter 07:05 14:06 21:07
Saturn 00:37 06:49 13:01
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.

Related news

29 Mar 2122  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
05 Nov 2122  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
18 Jan 2123  –  Uranus at opposition
03 Apr 2123  –  Uranus ends 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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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