Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°56' to the north of Mercury.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 1.2, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 Venus 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
Venus 07h33m10s 23°10'N Gemini -3.9 10"7
Mercury 07h33m10s 21°13'N Gemini 1.2 9"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° 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
06:47
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:07


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:15 12:41 17:06
Venus 10:12 14:37 19:02
Moon 03:16 08:44 14:02
Mars 20:23 03:50 11:17
Jupiter 16:52 00:22 07:53
Saturn 12:42 18:13 23:44
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

03 Sep 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
31 Oct 2013  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Dec 2013  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
18 Feb 2014  –  Venus 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