Uranus reaches opposition on November 25, a day after the full Moon passes close by in Taurus

Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, reaches opposition on November 25, 2026, the date given in NASA's list of the year's notable sky events. Our guide to the late November sky noted the date, but the list gives nothing beyond it, not even a time or a time zone. Here we add where the planet is, how bright and how far away it will be, and what the full Moon the night before means for anyone hoping to find it, using the ephemeris service run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Horizons, and NASA's own planet pages. All times are Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

What opposition means this year

Opposition puts a planet almost exactly opposite the Sun in our sky, and the Horizons table shows it happening. The angle between the Sun and Uranus, as seen from Earth's center, climbs from 168.5 degrees on November 15 to 179.8 degrees at 00:00 on November 26. At that point Horizons stops listing Uranus as leading the Sun, which it defines as a morning-sky object that rises and sets before the Sun, and starts listing it as trailing, an evening-sky object that rises and sets after it. By our reading, the switch therefore falls in the last six hours of November 25, UTC: still November 25 throughout the Americas, but already November 26 in East Asia and Australia. On our reading of the same table, Uranus is also nearest Earth late on November 25, when its range-rate turns from negative (approaching) to positive (receding).

That nearest distance is about 18.44 astronomical units, where one unit is the distance from the Sun to Earth. By our arithmetic, that is 2.76 billion km or 1.71 billion miles, and light takes about 2 hours 33 minutes to cross it. For comparison, NASA's Uranus fact page puts the planet's average distance from the Sun at about 19 astronomical units, a gap sunlight crosses in 2 hours 40 minutes.

Uranus does not get noticeably brighter at opposition. Horizons gives it an apparent magnitude of 5.60 on November 15, 5.599 on November 25 and 5.60 again on December 5: on a planet this far out, a few weeks either side of opposition make almost no difference.

Where to look

Uranus spends the whole period in Taurus, the Bull. Horizons puts it at right ascension 4h 05m 20s and declination +20 degrees 40 minutes (ICRF) at 00:00 on November 25, and its right ascension falls by about 3.5 minutes between November 15 and December 5, which by our reading is a slow drift west against the stars. The same constellation holds the Pleiades, Messier 45, which NASA's Hubble Messier catalog page describes as easily spotted with the unaided eye from a relatively dark site, at magnitude 1.6.

The Moon in the way

The timing is awkward. NASA's list has a supermoon on November 24, the day before opposition, and Horizons has the Moon crossing into Taurus, Uranus's constellation, by 06:00 that day. By our calculation from its positions, the Moon comes within about 5.1 degrees of Uranus at about 17:00 that day, while more than 99% of its disk is lit, then pulls away at roughly 13 degrees a day.

These separations are for an observer at Earth's center. The Moon is only about 360,000 km away, so from any real place on the ground its position against the stars is slightly different, and the exact figures shift with location. What does not change is that the Moon will be bright and nearby for several nights around opposition.

The planet itself

Uranus is an ice giant, four times wider than Earth at 51,118 km across, with 13 faint rings and 28 small moons named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, the fact page says. Its axis is tilted by 97.77 degrees, so it rolls around the Sun on its side over an orbit of about 84 years, and each pole spends roughly 21 years in darkness. Methane in its atmosphere absorbs red light, which gives it a blue-green color. William Herschel discovered it in 1781, the first planet found with the aid of a telescope; he took it at first for a comet or a star.

Only one spacecraft has been there. Voyager 2 flew within 81,500 km of the cloud tops on January 24, 1986, and found 10 new moons and two new rings, NASA's exploration page says; the rest of what is known comes from the Hubble Space Telescope and powerful ground-based telescopes. In April 2022 the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032 named a new mission to Uranus among its highest priorities, and the page says a possible flagship mission to Uranus will be a focus of NASA planetary science in the years to come.

Next in the sky

After Uranus, NASA's list has four more dates for 2026: the Geminid meteor shower on December 13-14, the December solstice on December 21, the Ursid meteor shower on December 21-22 and a Christmas Eve supermoon on December 24.