Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°44' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 29 days old.

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 no higher than 7° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.3 in the constellation Orion, and Mercury at mag -1.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 the Moon and Mercury 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
The Moon 06h05m50s 21°24'N Orion -8.3 33'16"1
Mercury 06h05m50s 23°08'N Gemini -1.0 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Jun 2026

The sky on 10 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
03:53


Waning Crescent

18%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:18 14:33 21:48
Venus 08:21 15:30 22:40
Moon 02:03 08:34 15:15
Mars 03:44 10:33 17:21
Jupiter 08:21 15:25 22:30
Saturn 02:15 08:26 14:36
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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25 Jun 1956  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
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30 Aug 1956  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
12 Oct 1956  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky

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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