Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 3°23' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 18:12 (PDT), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 17 minutes after the Sun at 19:07.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag -0.3, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 00h12m00s 0°02'N Pisces -3.9 10"3
Mercury 00h12m00s 3°25'N Pisces -0.3 7"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2026

The sky on 29 March 2026
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:16


Waxing Gibbous

89%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 11:17 16:57
Venus 07:38 14:09 20:41
Moon 16:10 22:50 05:20
Mars 06:01 11:52 17:42
Jupiter 12:19 19:28 02:38
Saturn 06:41 12:44 18:47
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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.

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06 Dec 2058  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning 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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