The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 44' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.
At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.
From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dusk.
The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Mercury at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Virgo.
The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 12h33m40s | 7°57'S | Virgo | -9.5 | 32'12"8 |
| Mercury | 12h33m40s | 7°13'S | Virgo | 0.3 | 8"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
The sky on 17 Jul 2024
| The sky on 17 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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86% 12 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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.
Related news
| 30 Aug 1956 | – Mercury at greatest elongation east |
| 12 Oct 1956 | – Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky |
| 11 Oct 1956 | – Mercury at greatest elongation west |
| 24 Dec 1956 | – Mercury at greatest elongation east |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.