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°22' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 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 0° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7, and Mercury at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h08m40s 16°02'N Leo -8.7 30'15"6
Mercury 10h08m40s 7°40'N Leo 1.3 9"8

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

The sky on 28 Mar 2026

The sky on 28 March 2026
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
19:09
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:18


Waxing Gibbous

82%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 11:18 16:58
Venus 07:39 14:09 20:39
Moon 15:05 22:03 04:51
Mars 06:03 11:53 17:42
Jupiter 12:22 19:32 02:41
Saturn 06:45 12:48 18:50
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

20 Jul 2057  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
03 Sep 2057  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
04 Sep 2057  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
14 Nov 2057  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share