Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°52' to the south of Mercury.

From Los Angeles however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h39m30s 14°58'S Capricornus -3.9 10"8
Mercury 21h39m30s 12°05'S Capricornus 1.0 9"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2024

The sky on 2 July 2024
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:08
Twilight ends
21:52
Twilight begins
03:58


Waning Crescent

10%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:12 14:18 21:24
Venus 06:19 13:29 20:39
Moon 02:34 09:56 17:28
Mars 02:19 09:07 15:54
Jupiter 03:31 10:34 17:37
Saturn 23:45 05:31 11:17
All times shown in PDT.

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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