Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°29' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:27 (PDT), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 24 minutes after the Sun at 21:26.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.8, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Gemini.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jun 2026

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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