Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°21' to the north of Uranus.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

Mercury will be at mag -0.3, and Uranus at mag 5.6, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 Mercury and Uranus 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
Mercury 07h37m20s 23°23'N Gemini -0.3 6"2
Uranus 07h37m20s 22°01'N Gemini 5.6 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
21:03
Twilight ends
23:03
Twilight begins
04:07


Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:57 15:10 22:23
Venus 06:50 14:14 21:38
Moon 07:29 15:12 22:44
Mars 02:38 09:40 16:43
Jupiter 03:39 10:58 18:17
Saturn 00:09 05:51 11:33
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.

Related news

28 Mar 2038  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
03 Nov 2038  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
16 Jan 2039  –  Uranus at opposition
01 Apr 2039  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

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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