Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 8°10' to the south of Mercury.
From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 2° below the horizon at dusk.
Venus will be at mag -4.2 in the constellation Sextans, and Mercury at mag -0.8 in the neighbouring constellation of Leo.
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 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 | 09h52m50s | 6°18'N | Sextans | -4.2 | 54"7 |
| Mercury | 09h52m50s | 14°29'N | Leo | -0.8 | 5"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.
The sky on 18 Aug 2024
| The sky on 18 August 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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99% 14 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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Warning
Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.
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
| 06 Jun 2015 | – Venus at greatest elongation east |
| 22 Oct 2015 | – Venus at highest altitude in morning sky |
| 26 Oct 2015 | – Venus at greatest elongation west |
| 12 Jan 2017 | – Venus at greatest elongation east |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.