Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 2°19' to the south of Mercury.
From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:18 (EST), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 15 minutes after the Sun at 20:15.
Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and Mercury at mag -0.9, both in the constellation Pisces.
The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 Jupiter 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 |
| Jupiter | 00h43m00s | 3°27'N | Pisces | -2.1 | 32"6 |
| Mercury | 00h43m00s | 5°46'N | Pisces | -0.9 | 6"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.
The sky on 29 Nov 2024
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0% 28 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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Warning
Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.
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.
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| 25 Dec 2011 | – Jupiter ends retrograde motion |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.