Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°36' to the south of Uranus.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.2, and Uranus at mag 5.7, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Uranus 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
Mercury 15h29m50s 21°20'S Libra -0.2 5"6
Uranus 15h29m50s 18°44'S Libra 5.7 3"5

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

The sky on 5 Apr 2026

The sky on 5 April 2026
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:15
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
05:06


Waning Gibbous

79%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:29 11:14 16:59
Venus 07:34 14:15 20:55
Moon 22:14 03:14 08:08
Mars 05:48 11:44 17:41
Jupiter 11:53 19:03 02:12
Saturn 06:16 12:20 18:23
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

30 Jul 2064  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
05 Mar 2065  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
19 May 2065  –  Uranus at opposition
04 Aug 2065  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

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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