Almanac · Planets

Planet events

Next when this page was built: Mars and Jupiter 1.2° apart, 16 Nov 2026, at 02:04 UTC. The next opposition is Jupiter’s on Thu 11 Feb 2027.

An outer planet is at opposition when the Earth passes between it and the Sun: it rises at sunset, is up all night and is near its brightest for the year. Mercury and Venus never get far from the Sun, and are best seen at greatest elongation, their widest angle from it — east of the Sun in the evening, west of it before dawn — though how high that puts them depends on your latitude and the season. A conjunction here is two planets passing within 3° of each other, close enough to read as a pair, and listed only when some latitude can see it.

How it is worked out: the planets are placed by VSOP87, the planetary theory the map draws, within about an arcsecond of JPL’s ephemeris; an opposition is the instant the planet’s longitude is the Sun’s plus 180°, a greatest elongation the widest angle from the Sun, and a conjunction the closest approach. The tests hold the dates and angles to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s and the published calendars’. The method and its measured error.

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