Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 3°28' 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 2° above the horizon at dusk.
Mercury will be at mag -0.5, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.
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 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 | 17h02m40s | 24°55'S | Ophiuchus | -0.5 | 5"1 |
| Saturn | 17h02m40s | 21°27'S | Ophiuchus | 0.4 | 15"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.
The sky on 23 Nov 2016
| The sky on 23 November 2016 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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20% 24 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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
| 13 Aug 2016 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 06 Apr 2017 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 15 Jun 2017 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 25 Aug 2017 | – 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.