Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 5°06' to the south of Saturn.

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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

Mercury will be at mag -0.1, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Libra.

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 Mercury and Saturn 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
Mercury 14h47m10s 19°01'S Libra -0.1 6"4
Saturn 14h47m10s 13°55'S Libra 0.5 15"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jul 2026

The sky on 11 July 2026
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
04:04


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 13:01 19:52
Venus 09:14 15:50 22:26
Moon 02:35 10:08 17:45
Mars 02:56 10:02 17:07
Jupiter 06:50 13:51 20:51
Saturn 00:18 06:30 12:42
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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