Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°09' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:15 (PDT) – 1 hour and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h25m00s 23°02'N Gemini -3.9 10"5
Mercury 06h25m00s 20°52'N Gemini 0.2 7"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 4 May 2026

The sky on 4 May 2026
Sunrise
05:57
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:24


Waning Gibbous

86%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:32 12:06 18:39
Venus 07:33 14:44 21:55
Moon 22:03 02:47 07:28
Mars 04:51 11:12 17:33
Jupiter 10:15 17:23 00:31
Saturn 04:31 10:38 16:46
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

01 Mar 2086  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
03 May 2087  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
16 May 2087  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
05 Oct 2087  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share