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 6°51' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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 6° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0 in the constellation Libra, and Mercury at mag -0.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Scorpius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 15h57m30s 16°27'S Libra -9.0 30'01"7
Mercury 15h57m30s 23°18'S Scorpius -0.2 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Jul 2026

The sky on 10 July 2026
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:03


Waning Crescent

13%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:17 13:08 19:59
Venus 09:12 15:50 22:27
Moon 01:46 09:05 16:32
Mars 02:58 10:03 17:07
Jupiter 06:53 13:54 20:54
Saturn 00:22 06:34 12:45
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

26 Aug 2130  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
04 Nov 2130  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
06 Nov 2130  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Dec 2130  –  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