Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°30' to the south of Saturn.

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 9° above the horizon at dawn.

Mercury will be at mag 0.0, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 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 06h57m50s 20°46'N Gemini 0.0 7"5
Saturn 06h57m50s 22°17'N Gemini 0.0 16"6

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

The sky on 26 Jul 2033

The sky on 26 July 2033
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:09
Twilight ends
22:09
Twilight begins
03:27


Waxing Crescent

0%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 03:59 11:24 18:49
Venus 02:35 10:03 17:32
Moon 05:57 13:01 19:59
Mars 18:17 22:22 02:26
Jupiter 21:34 02:57 08:21
Saturn 03:52 11:23 18:55
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.

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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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