The Moon, Mercury and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°01' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.
From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:47 (PDT) – 2 hours and 50 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:16.
The Moon will be at mag -10.3; Mercury will be at mag -0.7; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Libra.
They 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 the Moon and Mercury around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 14h41m40s | 12°14'S | Libra | -10.3 | 32'55"9 |
| Mercury | 14h44m10s | 14°10'S | Libra | -0.7 | 5"4 |
| Mars | 14h39m00s | 14°51'S | Libra | 1.7 | 4"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.
The sky on 24 Jul 2026
| The sky on 24 July 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
78% 10 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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.
Related news
| 19 Aug 2144 | – Mars ends retrograde motion |
| 03 Sep 2146 | – Mars enters retrograde motion |
| 30 Sep 2146 | – Mars at perigee |
| 07 Oct 2146 | – Mars at opposition |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.