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°36' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 12° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 3.5, 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 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 06h16m40s 24°12'N Gemini -3.9 9"9
Mercury 06h16m40s 21°36'N Gemini 3.5 11"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jul 2026

The sky on 27 July 2026
Sunrise
05:57
Sunset
19:56
Twilight ends
21:34
Twilight begins
04:19


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:43 11:40 18:38
Venus 09:35 15:50 22:05
Moon 19:09 23:57 04:50
Mars 02:36 09:46 16:56
Jupiter 06:04 13:02 20:00
Saturn 23:16 05:28 11:40
All times shown in PDT.

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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24 Apr 2153  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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