Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°56' to the south of Uranus.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 2° below the horizon at dusk.

Mercury will be at mag 0.1, and Uranus at mag 5.6, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 11h01m40s 5°04'N Leo 0.1 6"9
Uranus 11h01m40s 7°01'N Leo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 28 May 2024

The sky on 28 May 2024
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:18
Twilight begins
03:20


Waning Gibbous

71%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:35 11:35 18:35
Venus 05:19 12:41 20:02
Moon 00:29 05:08 09:55
Mars 03:18 09:46 16:14
Jupiter 05:03 12:19 19:34
Saturn 02:05 07:46 13:27
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

18 May 2049  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
25 Dec 2049  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
08 Mar 2050  –  Uranus at opposition
24 May 2050  –  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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