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°01' to the south of Uranus.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.3 in the constellation Cetus, and Uranus at mag 5.9 in the neighbouring constellation of 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 00h36m00s 1°07'N Cetus -0.3 5"8
Uranus 00h36m00s 3°09'N Pisces 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Apr 2024

The sky on 27 April 2024
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:30
Twilight begins
04:08


Waning Gibbous

81%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:10 11:29 17:48
Venus 05:36 12:12 18:48
Moon 22:59 03:24 07:45
Mars 04:25 10:21 16:16
Jupiter 06:43 13:51 20:59
Saturn 04:02 09:40 15:18
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

13 Dec 2012  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
17 Jul 2013  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
03 Oct 2013  –  Uranus at opposition
17 Dec 2013  –  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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