Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 55' to the south of Saturn.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 3° below the horizon at dawn.

Mercury will be at mag -0.6, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 22h06m30s 13°55'S Aquarius -0.6 4"9
Saturn 22h06m30s 12°59'S Aquarius 0.8 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Mar 2023

The sky on 2 March 2023
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
17:44
Twilight ends
19:15
Twilight begins
04:52


Waxing Gibbous

81%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 11:20 16:34
Venus 07:40 13:58 20:16
Moon 12:57 20:53 04:43
Mars 10:42 18:24 02:06
Jupiter 07:41 13:57 20:13
Saturn 06:02 11:19 16:35
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

22 Oct 2022  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
17 Jun 2023  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 Aug 2023  –  Saturn at opposition
04 Nov 2023  –  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.

Share