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 4°45' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Jacksonville however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 7° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 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 13h02m40s 4°28'S Virgo -9.2 29'56"0
Mercury 13h02m40s 9°14'S Virgo 0.0 6"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Sep 2034

The sky on 14 September 2034
Sunrise
07:07
Sunset
19:32
Twilight ends
20:53
Twilight begins
05:46


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:12 14:53 20:34
Venus 10:17 15:39 21:01
Moon 08:53 14:52 20:46
Mars 06:28 12:49 19:10
Jupiter 20:26 02:35 08:44
Saturn 03:15 10:07 16:59
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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