Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


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 25 Nov 2024

The sky on 25 November 2024
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
16:26
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Crescent

23%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:30 12:58 17:26
Venus 10:15 14:43 19:11
Moon 01:23 07:34 13:35
Mars 20:42 04:05 11:28
Jupiter 17:13 00:40 08:07
Saturn 12:57 18:29 00:01
All times shown in EST.

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.

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