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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°44' to the north of Mercury.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and Mercury at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 01h09m00s 6°09'N Pisces -2.1 32"8
Mercury 01h09m00s 4°24'N Pisces -0.2 6"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Jun 2024

The sky on 26 June 2024
Sunrise
05:19
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:10

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

67%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:19 13:54 21:29
Venus 05:46 13:20 20:54
Moon 23:35 04:50 10:16
Mars 02:17 09:13 16:09
Jupiter 03:32 10:53 18:13
Saturn 00:14 05:55 11:37
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

13 Nov 1998  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Aug 1999  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
23 Oct 1999  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Dec 1999  –  Jupiter 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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