Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 48' to the north of Mercury.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dawn.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, and Mercury at mag -0.7, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 04h27m10s 21°04'N Taurus -2.0 32"1
Mercury 04h27m10s 20°16'N Taurus -0.7 5"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2024

The sky on 6 July 2024
Sunrise
05:24
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:33
Twilight begins
03:18


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 14:29 21:47
Venus 06:06 13:34 21:02
Moon 05:36 13:39 21:34
Mars 01:58 09:02 16:07
Jupiter 03:00 10:22 17:45
Saturn 23:35 05:16 10:57
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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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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