Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 5°55' to the north of Mercury.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Leo.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Venus 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
Venus 10h16m20s 12°18'N Leo -3.9 10"2
Mercury 10h16m20s 6°23'N Leo 1.7 10"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Aug 2024

The sky on 6 August 2024
Sunrise
05:51
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
04:01


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:40 14:06 20:31
Venus 07:19 14:06 20:53
Moon 07:53 14:40 21:16
Mars 01:04 08:29 15:53
Jupiter 01:20 08:46 16:12
Saturn 21:31 03:10 08:50
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

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10 Jan 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
02 Feb 2025  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
31 May 2025  –  Venus 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.

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