Mars and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 6°04' 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.
Mars will be at mag 1.8 in the constellation Leo, and Mercury at mag 2.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Sextans.
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 Mars 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 |
| Mars | 10h16m50s | 11°50'N | Leo | 1.8 | 3"5 |
| Mercury | 10h16m50s | 5°45'N | Sextans | 2.5 | 10"6 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
The sky on 5 Aug 2026
| The sky on 5 August 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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53% 22 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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Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.