Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 55' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:11 (PDT) – 1 hour and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 11° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:17.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag -0.6, both in the constellation Libra.

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 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:

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

The sky on 10 Apr 2026

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 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.

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