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 5°35' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 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 2° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4 in the constellation Pisces, and Mercury at mag 0.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

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 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 23h31m50s 1°01'N Pisces -9.4 32'39"3
Mercury 23h31m50s 4°34'S Aquarius 0.5 8"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Apr 2032

The sky on 8 April 2032
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:32


Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:21 11:07 16:54
Venus 05:48 11:53 17:58
Moon 05:12 11:26 17:49
Mars 07:18 14:24 21:31
Jupiter 02:56 07:40 12:24
Saturn 09:13 16:42 00:11
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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13 Apr 2032  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
19 Jun 2032  –  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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