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°54' to the south of Uranus.

From Cambridge 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 dawn.

Mercury will be at mag 0.0, 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 03h10m40s 14°33'N Aries 0.0 7"2
Uranus 03h10m40s 17°27'N Aries 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jun 2023

The sky on 4 June 2023
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:27
Twilight begins
02:56


Waning Gibbous

99%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:07 11:06 18:05
Venus 08:24 15:58 23:32
Moon 20:19 00:41 04:58
Mars 09:17 16:36 23:56
Jupiter 03:14 10:01 16:48
Saturn 01:05 06:30 11:54
All times shown in EDT.

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 Jan 2023  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
28 Aug 2023  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
13 Nov 2023  –  Uranus at opposition
27 Jan 2024  –  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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