Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 39' to the north of Saturn.
From Cambridge 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 dawn.
Mercury will be at mag -0.9, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Aries.
The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Mercury and Saturn 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 | 02h28m40s | 13°02'N | Aries | -0.9 | 5"3 |
| Saturn | 02h28m40s | 12°22'N | Aries | 0.3 | 16"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
The sky on 26 Jun 2024
| The sky on 26 June 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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67% 20 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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.
Related news
| 29 Dec 1998 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 29 Aug 1999 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 06 Nov 1999 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 11 Jan 2000 | – Saturn 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.