The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°36' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.
At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.
From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.
The Moon will be at mag -9.5 in the constellation Cetus, and Mercury at mag 0.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.
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 the Moon 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 |
| The Moon | 02h27m20s | 9°37'N | Cetus | -9.5 | 33'04"9 |
| Mercury | 02h27m20s | 11°14'N | Aries | 0.1 | 7"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 23 May 2017
| The sky on 23 May 2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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2% 27 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
| 23 May 2017 | – Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky |
| 19 Jul 2017 | – Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky |
| 29 Jul 2017 | – Mercury at greatest elongation east |
| 12 Sep 2017 | – Mercury at greatest elongation west |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.