Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 4°24' to the north of Saturn.

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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

Mercury will be at mag -0.7, and Saturn at mag 0.2, 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 to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Saturn 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 02h39m10s 17°41'N Aries -0.7 6"5
Saturn 02h39m10s 13°17'N Aries 0.2 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Apr 2029

The sky on 14 April 2029
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
19:24
Twilight ends
21:05
Twilight begins
04:21


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:38 13:49 20:59
Venus 06:22 13:05 19:48
Moon 06:02 13:10 20:27
Mars 16:49 23:04 05:20
Jupiter 18:59 00:36 06:14
Saturn 06:57 13:50 20:43
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.

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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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