Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 5°24' to the south of Saturn.
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.
Mercury will be at mag -0.1, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Libra.
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 Mercury and Saturn 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 | 14h36m30s | 18°27'S | Libra | -0.1 | 6"8 |
| Saturn | 14h36m30s | 13°03'S | Libra | 0.5 | 15"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.
The sky on 1 Jul 2024
| The sky on 1 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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17% 25 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 08 Jul 2013 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 02 Mar 2014 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 10 May 2014 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 20 Jul 2014 | – Saturn 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.