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°46' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 05h31m40s 22°40'N Taurus -3.9 10"5
Mercury 05h31m40s 19°53'N Taurus 0.6 8"4

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 8 Jul 2026

The sky on 8 July 2026
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
04:01


Waning Crescent

32%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:29 13:21 20:12
Venus 09:09 15:49 22:29
Moon 00:33 07:16 14:09
Mars 03:01 10:05 17:08
Jupiter 06:59 14:00 21:00
Saturn 00:29 06:41 12:53
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.

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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.

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