Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 3°17' 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.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 Venus 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
Venus 08h33m30s 19°25'N Cancer -3.9 10"2
Mercury 08h33m30s 16°08'N Cancer 1.3 8"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
03:19


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 14:31 21:47
Venus 06:08 13:35 21:03
Moon 06:44 14:31 22:08
Mars 01:56 09:01 16:07
Jupiter 02:57 10:19 17:42
Saturn 23:31 05:12 10:53
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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30 May 2039  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
17 Oct 2039  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning 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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