Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 11' to the south of Mercury.

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 6° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus 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
Venus 13h46m40s 9°31'S Virgo -3.9 10"2
Mercury 13h46m40s 9°20'S Virgo 0.8 8"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Nov 2033

The sky on 5 November 2033
Sunrise
07:19
Sunset
17:31
Twilight ends
19:07
Twilight begins
05:43


Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:01 11:30 16:59
Venus 06:04 11:31 16:59
Moon 17:03 23:50 05:45
Mars 13:52 18:41 23:30
Jupiter 14:29 19:41 00:54
Saturn 21:47 05:14 12:42
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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12 Aug 2034  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
09 Dec 2034  –  Venus 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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