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 7°51' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:00 (PDT), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 40 minutes after the Sun at 21:11.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7, and Mercury at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 03h39m10s 14°27'N Taurus -8.7 30'13"1
Mercury 03h39m10s 22°19'N Taurus 0.3 8"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2026

The sky on 6 July 2026
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00


Waning Gibbous

58%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 13:33 20:25
Venus 09:06 15:49 22:31
Moon 23:37 05:44 11:59
Mars 03:03 10:07 17:10
Jupiter 07:05 14:06 21:07
Saturn 00:37 06:49 13:01
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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15 Aug 2055  –  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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