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 1°08' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 15° from it.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Mercury at mag 2.7, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible 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 03h50m00s 15°02'N Taurus -8.5 33'14"7
Mercury 03h50m00s 16°10'N Taurus 2.7 11"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jun 2035

The sky on 4 June 2035
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:20
Twilight ends
22:25
Twilight begins
03:13


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:49 11:51 18:53
Venus 04:25 11:34 18:44
Moon 04:28 11:24 18:28
Mars 01:07 06:23 11:38
Jupiter 03:34 10:24 17:14
Saturn 08:57 16:16 23:35
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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26 Jun 2035  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
18 Aug 2035  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening 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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