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 54' 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 5° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Mercury at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 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 20h24m10s 19°38'S Capricornus -8.9 30'49"8
Mercury 20h24m10s 20°32'S Capricornus -0.2 5"4

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

The sky on 27 Mar 2026

The sky on 27 March 2026
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
19:08
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Gibbous

73%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:39 11:19 16:59
Venus 07:39 14:08 20:37
Moon 13:57 21:12 04:18
Mars 06:05 11:54 17:43
Jupiter 12:26 19:36 02:45
Saturn 06:49 12:51 18:54
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 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

28 Jan 2056  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
08 Apr 2056  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
08 Apr 2056  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
26 May 2056  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west

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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