Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°07' to the south of Uranus.

From Jacksonville 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 dawn.

Mercury will be at mag 0.2, and Uranus at mag 5.9, 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 through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Uranus 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
Mercury 00h22m40s 0°25'S Pisces 0.2 7"4
Uranus 00h22m40s 1°42'N Pisces 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2024

The sky on 28 November 2024
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
17:25
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:36


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:15 13:17 18:20
Venus 10:19 15:20 20:21
Moon 04:40 10:09 15:32
Mars 21:33 04:29 11:24
Jupiter 18:02 01:00 07:58
Saturn 13:09 18:51 00:33
All times shown in EST.

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

10 Dec 2011  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
13 Jul 2012  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
29 Sep 2012  –  Uranus at opposition
13 Dec 2012  –  Uranus 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.

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