Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°08' to the north of Uranus.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 15° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -1.0, and Uranus at mag 5.9, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Uranus 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 02h44m40s 17°41'N Aries -1.0 6"0
Uranus 02h44m40s 15°33'N Aries 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Apr 2022

The sky on 18 April 2022
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:35
Twilight ends
21:16
Twilight begins
04:27


Waning Gibbous

92%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:42 13:51 20:59
Venus 04:29 10:07 15:46
Moon 20:52 02:08 07:14
Mars 04:05 09:25 14:46
Jupiter 04:56 10:49 16:42
Saturn 03:39 08:49 14:00
All times shown in EDT.

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

18 Jan 2022  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
24 Aug 2022  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
09 Nov 2022  –  Uranus at opposition
22 Jan 2023  –  Uranus 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.

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