Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 3°47' to the south of Uranus.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Mercury will be at mag 0.8, and Uranus at mag 5.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h37m30s 18°14'N Taurus 0.8 8"7
Uranus 04h37m30s 22°02'N Taurus 5.8 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jun 2028

The sky on 23 June 2028
Sunrise
05:05
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:50


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:00 11:13 18:27
Venus 03:31 10:40 17:50
Moon 05:50 13:40 21:20
Mars 03:41 11:12 18:43
Jupiter 11:34 17:57 00:20
Saturn 02:13 09:00 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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03 Dec 2028  –  Uranus at opposition
16 Feb 2029  –  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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