Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 46' to the north of Mercury.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

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 9° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Venus 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
Venus 06h44m10s 24°20'N Gemini -3.9 10"7
Mercury 06h44m10s 23°33'N Gemini 1.1 9"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jul 2026

The sky on 5 July 2026
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waning Gibbous

70%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:47 13:39 20:32
Venus 09:05 15:48 22:32
Moon 23:11 05:01 10:58
Mars 03:05 10:08 17:10
Jupiter 07:07 14:09 21:10
Saturn 00:41 06:53 13:04
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.

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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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