Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°12' to the south of Mercury.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:30 (EDT) – 1 hour and 40 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:44.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h20m30s 20°26'S Scorpius -3.9 10"8
Mercury 16h20m30s 19°14'S Scorpius -0.4 6"6

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

The sky on 27 Jul 2024

The sky on 27 July 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:14
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
03:46


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:02 14:38 21:13
Venus 06:55 13:58 21:01
Moon 23:15 06:02 13:02
Mars 01:21 08:40 15:59
Jupiter 01:53 09:18 16:42
Saturn 22:11 03:51 09:32
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.

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27 Nov 2045  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
09 Feb 2046  –  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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