Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°54' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:32 (PDT), 12° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 24 minutes after the Sun at 18:37.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7, and Mercury at mag -0.8, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 the Moon 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
The Moon 21h54m00s 14°51'S Capricornus -8.7 32'38"0
Mercury 21h54m00s 12°56'S Capricornus -0.8 6"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 May 2026

The sky on 14 May 2026
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:12


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:51 12:47 19:44
Venus 07:41 14:57 22:13
Moon 04:06 10:46 17:37
Mars 04:32 11:01 17:30
Jupiter 09:43 16:50 23:58
Saturn 03:55 10:03 16:11
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 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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30 Jan 2093  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
05 Mar 2093  –  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.

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