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°32' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

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 05:42 (EST) – 1 hour and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:52.

The Moon will be at mag -9.1, and Mercury at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h49m50s 19°16'S Sagittarius -9.1 29'23"1
Mercury 18h49m50s 20°49'S Sagittarius -0.0 7"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
17:26
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:32


Waning Crescent

43%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:38 13:37 18:36
Venus 10:15 15:14 20:13
Moon 00:11 06:49 13:20
Mars 21:50 04:45 11:41
Jupiter 18:24 01:22 08:21
Saturn 13:29 19:11 00:52
All times shown in EST.

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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