The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Mercury will make a close approach, passing within a mere 19.3 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:48 (EDT), 10° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 37 minutes after the Sun at 21:59.

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Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Mercury will be at mag -0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Mercury around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 06h07m00s 25°16'N Gemini -4.2 52"7
Mercury 06h07m00s 25°36'N Gemini -0.5 6"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 Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
05:06

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

86%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:08 13:57 20:46
Venus 06:08 11:53 17:38
Moon 21:47 02:58 08:00
Mars 05:29 10:52 16:16
Jupiter 08:21 15:22 22:23
Saturn 05:52 11:26 17:00
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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09 Sep 1980  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
10 Nov 1981  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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