Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 30' to the south of Saturn.
At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.
From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dawn.
Mercury will be at mag -0.2, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Cetus.
The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 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 | 00h31m00s | 0°30'N | Cetus | -0.2 | 6"0 |
| Saturn | 00h31m00s | 1°00'N | Cetus | 0.8 | 15"9 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
The sky on 20 Apr 2026
| The sky on 20 April 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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15% 3 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 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.