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 8°59' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 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 1° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Mercury at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 02h32m30s 20°17'N Aries -9.0 33'19"9
Mercury 02h32m30s 11°18'N Aries 1.2 9"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jun 2026

The sky on 15 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
03:52


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:27 14:37 21:47
Venus 08:30 15:35 22:40
Moon 05:58 13:37 21:13
Mars 03:36 10:27 17:19
Jupiter 08:06 15:10 22:14
Saturn 01:57 08:07 14:18
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

13 Apr 1990  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
30 May 1990  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
06 Jun 1990  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
01 Aug 1990  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening 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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