The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°08' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.
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 6° above the horizon at dawn.
The Moon will be at mag -9.5 in the constellation Aquarius, and Mercury at mag 0.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.
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 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 | 20h55m50s | 12°04'S | Aquarius | -9.5 | 31'47"6 |
| Mercury | 20h55m50s | 17°13'S | Capricornus | 0.1 | 7"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.
The sky on 3 Oct 2024
| The sky on 3 October 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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2% 1 day 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
| 21 Feb 1995 | – Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky |
| 01 Mar 1995 | – Mercury at greatest elongation west |
| 10 May 1995 | – Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky |
| 11 May 1995 | – 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.