Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 8°24' to the north of Mercury.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 7° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.4, and Mercury at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus 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
Venus 00h08m40s 6°29'N Pisces -4.4 52"9
Mercury 00h08m40s 1°54'S Pisces -0.0 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Oct 2024

The sky on 5 October 2024
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
18:27
Twilight ends
19:59
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Crescent

11%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 12:54 18:37
Venus 09:40 14:42 19:44
Moon 09:38 14:39 19:32
Mars 23:37 07:08 14:38
Jupiter 21:47 05:15 12:43
Saturn 17:22 22:55 04:28
All times shown in EDT.

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

08 Feb 1993  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
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04 Aug 1993  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
09 Jun 1994  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky

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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