The photo shows Venus and Mercury only 1.2° apart. The Sun had set 13 minutes earlier when I managed to capture the pair, roughly 2° above the western horizon and only 7.9° from the Sun. Although the visibility of the conjunction was unfavorable from the Southern Hemisphere (-23° latitude), finding Venus was easy but Mercury was quite a challenge (the photo shows it at a mere 1.9° altitude). Accounting for the 2.3 mag difference, added to the differential atmospheric extinction, Mercury would look some 20 times dimmer than Venus and that should explain why it was so hard to spot.

A Nikon CoolPix P900 camera was used at manual mode (ISO 100, 1/60s, F6.5, 80x magnification).

Cropped with PhotoScape and labeled with Paint.