The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°32' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 29 days old.
From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:13 (PDT) – 1 hour and 16 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:09.
The Moon will be at mag -8.2, and Mercury at mag -0.7, 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 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 | 15h18m50s | 23°26'S | Libra | -8.2 | 31'08"4 |
| Mercury | 15h18m50s | 16°54'S | Libra | -0.7 | 5"3 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.
The sky on 16 Jul 2026
| The sky on 16 July 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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7% 2 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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| 31 Jan 2139 | – Mercury at greatest elongation east |
| 02 Feb 2139 | – Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky |
| 08 Mar 2139 | – 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.