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 7°17' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:43 (EST), 12° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 55 minutes after the Sun at 22:02.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Taurus.

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

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 05h17m20s 18°03'N Taurus -9.2 33'01"7
Mercury 05h17m20s 25°21'N Taurus 0.3 7"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 19 May 2034

The sky on 19 May 2034
Sunrise
05:28
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
22:04
Twilight begins
03:32


Waxing Crescent

6%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:39 14:20 22:02
Venus 07:26 15:06 22:46
Moon 07:09 14:26 21:46
Mars 07:12 14:49 22:26
Jupiter 03:18 09:25 15:32
Saturn 08:50 16:18 23:45
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.

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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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