Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 17' to the south of Mercury.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:34 (PDT) – 1 hour and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:38.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag -0.6, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 12h33m30s 1°57'S Virgo -3.9 10"4
Mercury 12h33m30s 1°39'S Virgo -0.6 7"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Virgo 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

6%

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.

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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09 Aug 2042  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
10 Dec 2042  –  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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