Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°43' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Mercury at mag 1.5, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 the Moon 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
The Moon 06h22m40s 26°26'N Gemini -9.0 33'00"6
Mercury 06h22m40s 23°43'N Gemini 1.5 9"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jun 2027

The sky on 6 June 2027
Sunrise
05:05
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:29
Twilight begins
02:54


Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 14:08 21:45
Venus 04:11 11:26 18:41
Moon 06:39 14:40 22:32
Mars 11:52 18:29 01:06
Jupiter 10:16 17:18 00:19
Saturn 02:48 09:18 15:48
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.

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28 May 2027  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
15 Jul 2027  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
19 Jul 2027  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
14 Sep 2027  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky

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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