Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 52' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:30 (PDT) – 1 hour and 16 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 11° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:29.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag -0.9, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 11h56m00s 1°35'N Virgo -1.7 30"1
Mercury 11h56m00s 2°28'N Virgo -0.9 6"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jun 2026

The sky on 25 June 2026
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:52
Twilight begins
03:54


Waxing Gibbous

87%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:24 14:24 21:24
Venus 08:48 15:43 22:38
Moon 16:51 21:50 02:45
Mars 03:20 10:17 17:15
Jupiter 07:36 14:39 21:42
Saturn 01:19 07:30 13:42
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 DE440 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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