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 4°48' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:32 (PDT), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 46 minutes after the Sun at 21:45.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4, and Mercury at mag 0.4, 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 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 07h09m30s 18°55'N Gemini -9.4 32'38"7
Mercury 07h09m30s 23°43'N Gemini 0.4 8"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Jun 2026

The sky on 24 June 2026
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:54


Waxing Gibbous

78%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:26 14:26 21:27
Venus 08:46 15:42 22:39
Moon 15:51 21:04 02:11
Mars 03:21 10:18 17:15
Jupiter 07:39 14:42 21:45
Saturn 01:23 07:34 13:45
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

11 Jun 2105  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
15 Jun 2105  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
01 Aug 2105  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
04 Aug 2105  –  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.

Share