Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 41' to the north of Uranus.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 21° from it.

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

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 09h13m30s 17°25'N Cancer -0.3 5"8
Uranus 09h13m30s 16°44'N Cancer 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2024

The sky on 25 July 2024
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
03:26


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:32 21:13
Venus 06:38 13:47 20:56
Moon 22:20 04:15 10:24
Mars 01:12 08:33 15:55
Jupiter 01:47 09:15 16:44
Saturn 22:12 03:51 09:30
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

20 Apr 2043  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
27 Nov 2043  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
09 Feb 2044  –  Uranus at opposition
24 Apr 2044  –  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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