Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°58' to the north of Uranus.

From Columbus 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 dusk.

Mercury will be at mag -0.3, and Uranus at mag 5.7, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Uranus 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 05h59m40s 25°38'N Taurus -0.3 6"7
Uranus 05h59m40s 23°39'N Taurus 5.7 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 29 May 2033

The sky on 29 May 2033
Sunrise
06:03
Sunset
20:51
Twilight ends
22:49
Twilight begins
04:06


Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:20 14:59 22:37
Venus 04:01 10:27 16:53
Moon 07:17 14:40 22:03
Mars 23:27 03:56 08:25
Jupiter 02:06 07:34 13:02
Saturn 08:01 15:27 22:53
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.

Related news

05 Mar 2033  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
11 Oct 2033  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
25 Dec 2033  –  Uranus at opposition
10 Mar 2034  –  Uranus 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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