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 9°27' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:18 (PDT) – 1 hour and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

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Venus will be at mag -4.4, and Mercury at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h36m40s 1°16'S Aquarius -4.4 53"0
Mercury 22h36m40s 10°43'S Aquarius 0.0 6"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Apr 2026

The sky on 26 April 2026
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:31
Twilight ends
21:02
Twilight begins
04:34

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

82%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:43 17:59
Venus 07:30 14:35 21:39
Moon 15:06 21:33 03:50
Mars 05:07 11:21 17:35
Jupiter 10:41 17:50 00:58
Saturn 05:00 11:07 17:13
All times shown in PDT.

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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20 Jul 2073  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
06 Jun 2074  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky

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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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