Mars and Jupiter will appear closer together than they have in months on the mornings of 15 and 16 November 2026, when the two planets pass about 1.2 degrees apart in the pre-dawn sky.
NASA’s November 2026 skywatching guide calls the pairing one of the month’s headline events. The planets will be close enough to fit in the same binocular field, and both are easy naked-eye targets for anyone willing to set an early alarm.
How to see the pairing
Look southeast before sunrise, about 45 to 60 minutes before the Sun comes up. Jupiter is the brighter point of light; reddish Mars sits beside it. BBC Sky at Night Magazine describes the pair at their closest as looking like “a bright double star”, and they will be bunched up close to Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, so they may even look like a triple star.
The pair rises around 11 p.m. and is best placed in the hours before dawn. Because the planets move slowly against the stars, they will look close for several mornings before and after 15 to 16 November, so a cloudy morning does not mean missing the show entirely.
Four planets in a line
The Mars-Jupiter meeting is the centrepiece of a wider morning lineup. From roughly 13 to 22 November, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter form a line rising from the southeast horizon before dawn, with Mars highest and Mercury lowest. Venus passed between Earth and the Sun in late October, moving it from the evening sky to the morning sky, and it climbs higher before dawn every day this month.
It is worth remembering that the closeness is only a line-of-sight effect. Jupiter is roughly 350 million miles beyond Mars, and the pairing is pure perspective from Earth. Watch over several mornings and you can see the two planets draw together and then drift apart again.
A month to look up
The conjunction sits between two meteor showers — the Northern Taurids on 11 to 12 November and the Leonids on 17 to 18 November — and ahead of the Beaver supermoon on 24 November. For skywatchers, mid-November 2026 is one of the busiest stretches of the year, and the Mars-Jupiter pairing is the one morning worth losing sleep for.
Sources: NASA JPL “What’s Up: November 2026”; BBC Sky at Night Magazine planet alignment guide; Royal Museums Greenwich (via Consensus Daily, 4 Nov 2026).
