The Moon, Mercury and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 2°02' of each other. The Moon will be 2 days old.
From South El Monte however, the trio will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 10° above the horizon at dusk.
The Moon will be at mag -9.3; Mercury will be at mag 0.3; and Neptune will be at mag 7.8. The trio will lie in the constellation Cancer.
They 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.
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 Mercury 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 | 08h44m00s | 16°13'N | Cancer | -9.3 | 29'31"6 |
| Mercury | 08h46m50s | 18°08'N | Cancer | 0.3 | 7"7 |
| Neptune | 08h47m40s | 17°47'N | Cancer | 7.8 | 2"3 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.
The sky on 3 May 2026
| The sky on 3 May 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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92% 17 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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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| 23 Aug 2084 | – Mercury 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.