Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°25' to the north of Mercury.

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 4° above the horizon at dawn.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Pisces.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter 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
Jupiter 01h13m40s 6°37'N Pisces -2.1 32"7
Mercury 01h13m40s 5°11'N Pisces -0.4 5"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Aug 2026

The sky on 14 August 2026
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:38


Waxing Crescent

11%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:07 12:04 19:01
Venus 09:52 15:44 21:35
Moon 08:21 14:39 20:48
Mars 02:15 09:28 16:40
Jupiter 05:13 12:08 19:02
Saturn 22:05 04:16 10:27
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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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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