Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 18' to the north of Saturn.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Grayslake however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dawn.

Mercury will be at mag -0.7, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 03h55m10s 18°46'N Taurus -0.7 5"8
Saturn 03h55m10s 18°27'N Taurus 0.1 16"5

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

The sky on 8 Jun 2030

The sky on 8 June 2030
Sunrise
05:12
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
03:00


Waxing Gibbous

52%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:22 11:37 18:53
Venus 03:33 10:29 17:24
Moon 12:21 18:41 00:51
Mars 04:59 12:33 20:07
Jupiter 17:49 22:50 03:51
Saturn 04:24 11:38 18:53
All times shown in CDT.

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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01 Feb 2031  –  Saturn 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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