The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°38' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 21:26 (EDT), 9° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 27 minutes after the Sun at 22:28.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6 in the constellation Auriga, and Mercury at mag -0.6 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

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 the Moon 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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Oct 2024

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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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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