Events · August 14, 2026

Mercury and Jupiter Meet on 15 August: the Tightest Conjunction of the Half-Year

Tomorrow, 15 August, before dawn, the two brightest objects in the morning sky will stand 0.75 degrees apart. Jupiter at magnitude −1.78, Mercury at −1.19: two hard points, brighter than any star in the August sky, fitting inside a circle one and a half times the width of the full Moon. It is the tightest planetary conjunction of the second half of 2026; the next one, Mars and Jupiter at 1.19 degrees, does not come until 16 November.

Let us say straight away what most articles leave out: this will be hard. The absolute minimum separation, 0.55 degrees, falls at 12:43, in broad daylight, and is therefore invisible. By the time the two planets rise they are twelve degrees from the Sun, in a dawn that is already going pale. The whole thing plays out in about forty minutes, between four and nine degrees of altitude.

Three quarters of a degree: what does that look like?

The full Moon is roughly half a degree wide. The two planets will therefore be one and a half Moon widths apart: at arm’s length, a little less than the width of your little finger. A standard pair of binoculars gives a five to seven degree field, so they will sit together in it comfortably, with room to spare. To the naked eye they stay two clearly separate points, never merged.

One clarification that heads off a common misreading: a conjunction is a matter of perspective and nothing else. Mercury and Jupiter are not getting closer. They are lined up along our direction of view, and separated in space by several hundred million kilometres.

The real obstacle is not the separation, it is the altitude

Mercury rises at 05:29, Jupiter at 05:34. Nautical dawn began five minutes earlier, at 05:24; civil dawn is at 06:08 and the Sun rises at 06:43. So the scene climbs into a sky that brightens at exactly the same pace. Here are both curves, computed for Paris.

The trade-off is right there in the table: the longer you wait, the higher the planets climb, and the brighter the sky gets. The usable window runs from 06:00 to 06:25, when the pair goes from four to eight degrees with the Sun still below −3°. Earlier is too low; later, the sky background has won.

The azimuth is the second number to remember: between 66 and 71°, which is east-north-east. Not due east. Plenty of people will miss this because they looked twenty degrees too far to the right.

How to actually do it

You need an absolutely clear east-north-east horizon: a hill, a hedgerow or a four-storey building two hundred metres away is enough to cancel the whole thing. Scout the spot the day before, in daylight. A north-east facing beach, a plateau, a viaduct, a harvested field: what matters is the skyline, not the altitude.

Start with the naked eye around 06:00: Jupiter, the brighter of the two, will come out of the blue first. Mercury, half a degree higher, will often need binoculars to be picked up, then becomes visible unaided once you know where it is. A pair of 8×42 or 10×50 binoculars is the right instrument here: a telescope adds nothing at such a low altitude, where atmospheric turbulence boils the image.

One precaution, and it is absolute: put the binoculars away before 06:30. The Sun rises at 06:43 in the same direction, a few degrees away, and sweeping the horizon with binoculars while it appears risks an immediate retinal burn, painless and permanent. This is not a formality: it is precisely the configuration in which accidents happen.

And if tomorrow morning is clouded out?

The scene holds for several mornings. On the 14th the two planets are 2.2° apart; on the 16th, 1.3°; on the 17th, 3.0°. The morning of 16 August is therefore an excellent fallback: the separation stays under two full-Moon widths, in the same altitude conditions. Beyond the 18th, Mercury pulls away fast, by around 1.8° a day.

To check what your own horizon gives from your exact position, the SkyChart sky map recomputes both altitudes and both azimuths for your latitude, minute by minute.

The limits of these figures

Positions are topocentric, computed for Paris and corrected for standard atmospheric refraction. Near the horizon, real refraction depends on temperature and pressure: allow a few tenths of a degree of uncertainty on the altitudes, which shifts by a few minutes the moment the planets actually clear your skyline. Magnitudes are the instantaneous values, before atmospheric extinction: at four degrees of altitude the air takes off something like a magnitude and a half. Finally, none of these values contains any weather, and at four degrees the weather decides everything.

• Conjunctions
• August 2026 sky