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 35' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:00 (PDT) – 1 hour and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:15.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Mercury at mag -0.6, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 15h08m50s 15°50'S Libra -8.9 30'45"7
Mercury 15h08m50s 15°15'S Libra -0.6 6"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Nov 2032

The sky on 30 November 2032
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
16:41
Twilight ends
18:10
Twilight begins
05:07


Waning Crescent

1%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 10:18 15:39
Venus 09:56 14:49 19:42
Moon 04:26 09:54 15:18
Mars 02:39 08:24 14:10
Jupiter 10:14 15:18 20:22
Saturn 18:27 01:35 08:42
All times shown in PST.

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

30 Nov 2032  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
12 Feb 2033  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Feb 2033  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
20 Mar 2033  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning 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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