Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 35' to the south of Mercury.
From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:42 (PDT), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 13 minutes after the Sun at 18:39.
Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, and Mercury at mag -1.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.
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 | 22h40m50s | 9°22'S | Aquarius | -2.0 | 32"4 |
| Mercury | 22h40m50s | 8°46'S | Aquarius | -1.0 | 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 Capricornus at this time of year.
The sky on 24 Jun 2026
| The sky on 24 June 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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78% 9 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.