Conjunction of Mercury and Eris

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and 136199 Eris will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 8°07' to the north of 136199 Eris.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 9° below the horizon at dawn.

Mercury will be at mag 0.2 in the constellation Pisces, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and 136199 Eris 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 01h48m40s 7°48'N Pisces 0.2 7"4
136199 Eris 01h48m40s 0°19'S Cetus 18.7 0"0

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 14 May 2024

The sky on 14 May 2024
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
20:39
Twilight ends
22:30
Twilight begins
04:24


Waxing Crescent

44%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:20 11:50 18:20
Venus 06:04 13:04 20:05
Moon 12:00 19:28 02:45
Mars 04:27 10:40 16:53
Jupiter 06:30 13:39 20:49
Saturn 03:36 09:17 14:57
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

18 Oct 2023  –  136199 Eris at opposition
18 Oct 2024  –  136199 Eris at opposition
18 Oct 2025  –  136199 Eris at opposition
18 Oct 2026  –  136199 Eris at opposition

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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