Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°52' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 20:59 (EST), 14° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 47 minutes after the Sun at 22:15.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h02m00s 18°12'N Gemini -9.2 29'24"6
Mercury 07h02m00s 24°05'N Gemini 0.3 7"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Nov 2024

The sky on 27 November 2024
Sunrise
07:00
Sunset
17:25
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:35


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:22 13:23 18:24
Venus 10:18 15:19 20:20
Moon 03:45 09:27 15:03
Mars 21:36 04:32 11:28
Jupiter 18:06 01:05 08:03
Saturn 13:13 18:55 00:37
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

09 Jun 2013  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
12 Jun 2013  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
30 Jul 2013  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
01 Aug 2013  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share