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 4°57' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.4, and Mercury at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h46m40s 17°20'S Libra -8.4 30'47"3
Mercury 15h46m40s 22°17'S Libra 0.9 8"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Nov 2032

The sky on 4 November 2032
Sunrise
07:25
Sunset
17:43
Twilight ends
19:17
Twilight begins
05:51


Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:02 13:41 18:21
Venus 10:50 15:17 19:44
Moon 08:46 13:48 18:48
Mars 04:05 10:08 16:11
Jupiter 13:01 17:43 22:26
Saturn 20:57 04:24 11:51
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.

Related news

21 Oct 2032  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
13 Nov 2032  –  Transit of Mercury
29 Nov 2032  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
30 Nov 2032  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west

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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