The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 5°26' to the south of Mercury.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 1° below the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -4.5, and Mercury at mag -0.1, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 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 14h12m20s 21°09'S Virgo -4.5 51"5
Mercury 14h12m20s 15°43'S Virgo -0.1 6"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Oct 2026

The sky on 5 October 2026
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
18:28
Twilight ends
19:59
Twilight begins
05:19

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

22%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:01 14:07 19:14
Venus 09:23 14:07 18:52
Moon 00:59 08:37 16:03
Mars 01:03 08:22 15:41
Jupiter 02:27 09:26 16:25
Saturn 18:32 00:41 06:50
All times shown in EDT.

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.

Related news

14 Aug 2026  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
11 Dec 2026  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
03 Jan 2027  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
21 Mar 2028  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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