Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


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

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.2, and Uranus at mag 5.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h50m10s 19°12'S Capricornus -0.2 5"4
Uranus 20h50m10s 18°20'S Capricornus 5.9 3"3

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

The sky on 2 May 2026

The sky on 2 May 2026
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:36
Twilight ends
21:09
Twilight begins
04:26


Waning Gibbous

96%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 11:59 18:28
Venus 07:32 14:42 21:51
Moon 20:04 01:09 06:08
Mars 04:55 11:14 17:34
Jupiter 10:21 17:30 00:38
Saturn 04:39 10:45 16:52
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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03 Aug 2082  –  Uranus at opposition
19 Oct 2082  –  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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