Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°12' to the south of Mercury.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

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 dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Mercury at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h03m50s 13°49'N Cancer -4.3 50"0
Mercury 09h03m50s 15°02'N Cancer 0.9 9"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Apr 2026

The sky on 24 April 2026
Sunrise
06:08
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:00
Twilight begins
04:37


Waxing Gibbous

66%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:38 17:50
Venus 07:30 14:32 21:35
Moon 12:58 20:01 02:54
Mars 05:11 11:23 17:36
Jupiter 10:48 17:56 01:05
Saturn 05:08 11:14 17:20
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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10 Oct 2071  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
26 Dec 2072  –  Venus 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.

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