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 Jacksonville , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:07 (EDT) – 1 hour and 31 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:11.

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
06:38
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
21:55
Twilight begins
05:06


Waxing Crescent

0%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 12:06 19:00
Venus 03:49 10:46 17:42
Moon 07:01 13:45 20:25
Mars 18:15 23:04 03:52
Jupiter 22:02 03:39 09:17
Saturn 05:07 12:06 19:04
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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