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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 40' to the south of Mars.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dawn.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Aries.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mars 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
Jupiter 02h52m30s 15°32'N Aries -2.0 32"4
Mars 02h52m30s 16°13'N Aries 1.3 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jul 2026

The sky on 28 July 2026
Sunrise
05:57
Sunset
19:56
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
04:20

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:40 11:38 18:36
Venus 09:36 15:50 22:04
Moon 19:47 00:45 05:51
Mars 02:35 09:45 16:55
Jupiter 06:02 12:59 19:57
Saturn 23:12 05:24 11:36
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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19 Jan 2155  –  Jupiter 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

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Longitude:
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34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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