Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Mercury will make a close approach, passing within 7°00' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:59 (PDT) – 3 hours and 45 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 36° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:26.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Venus will be at mag -4.5; and Mercury will be at mag -0.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 14h04m00s 17°09'S Virgo -10.7 32'02"7
Venus 14h12m20s 10°26'S Virgo -4.5 27"4
Mercury 14h14m10s 11°11'S Virgo -0.7 6"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Apr 2026

The sky on 11 April 2026
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
19:19
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
04:57


Waning Crescent

30%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:18 17:09
Venus 07:31 14:19 21:08
Moon 03:12 08:15 13:23
Mars 05:36 11:38 17:39
Jupiter 11:32 18:41 01:51
Saturn 05:55 11:59 18:03
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.

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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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