♂ Mars Combustion 2026

Seen from Earth, Mars and the Sun are heading the same way through the zodiac at nearly the same pace whenever they meet: Mars covers 0.64° to 0.78° a day, the Sun 0.95° to 1.02°. That is why the Sun takes more than two years to come round to Mars again, and why, once it does, Mars stays inside the 17° combust zone for weeks. At each conjunction Mars is on the far side of the Sun, between 2.39 and 2.68 AU away, near its greatest distance and at its faintest.

Mars is the planet of heat, effort, cutting and quarrels. In the traditional reading a combust Mars has heat without reach: the will to act is there but cannot get out. Modern astrologers tend to describe the same weeks as low drive and short tempers at once, and treat them as a time to plan a fight rather than start one.

The five Mars cazimis in the data fall 769 to 802 days apart. Each falls 37° to 72° ahead of the last in the zodiac, so across these years the meetings move through Capricorn, Aries, Gemini, Cancer and Leo.

The cycle is a little over two years, so the combustions skip calendar years: 2027, 2029, 2031, 2033 and 2035 have no combust Mars day at all.

Five periods. Mars moves 33° to 61° forward while it is combust, so each one crosses two or three signs and ends in a later sign than it began, as the path column shows.

Mars is combust at the start of 2026, in a period that began on December 7, 2025 and ends on February 14, 2026: 69 days within 8°30′ of the Sun, with the cazimi on January 9, 2026, at 11:41 UTC, at 19°12′ Capricorn.

What matters is how much ground the Sun gains on Mars each day, which in these years ranges from 0.214° to 0.326°. Sorted by that gain, the combustions fall in exact order of length: the smallest gain gives the longest stay, the largest gain the shortest.

The gain is small when Mars itself moves fast, and Mars moves fastest when it is nearest the Sun in its orbit. At the March 21, 2028 cazimi, the longest combustion at 78 days, Mars was 1.39 AU from the Sun and moved 0.779° a day. At the August 19, 2034 cazimi, the shortest at 52 days, it was 1.66 AU out and moved 0.636°. Those are also the nearest and farthest of the five.

Mars goes retrograde only around its opposition, when Earth passes between it and the Sun, and is combust only around its conjunction, on the far side of the Sun. The two are about a year apart. In these years the last direct station came 319 to 394 days before a Mars cazimi, and the next retrograde station 308 to 366 days after it.

So none of the five combustions overlaps a retrograde, and none can. Anyone reading a slow, frustrating stretch in a Mars combustion is reading the combustion alone.

Over these years 8% of days have a combust Mars, in long blocks every other year, so whole birth cohorts share it and the years between have none. The traditional reading of a natal combust Mars is drive in the service of the self: ambition tied closely to identity, anger slow to show and quick to turn inward. The Sun's sign shows the arena.

A natal Mars cazimi, inside the 1.7- to 2.6-day window, is read as courage and identity working together, the Sun lending Mars its authority.

To see the separation in your own chart, open the birth chart calculator and compare the Sun and Mars.

Five of the 11 years have no combust Mars day. In the others the count runs from 25 days, where a period is split by New Year, to 80.

A high-precision ephemeris gives the positions, geocentric and apparent, in the tropical zodiac. A Mars combustion runs from the moment the longitudes of Mars and the Sun come within 8°30′ of each other until they separate again (17° for under the beams, 17′ for cazimi); each crossing is found to the second and checked by a second, independent run. The daily motions in the cycle table are measured over a full day around each cazimi.

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