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 2°19' to the south of Mercury.

From Newark , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:22 (EST), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 14 minutes after the Sun at 20:18.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and Mercury at mag -0.9, 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 00h43m00s 3°27'N Pisces -2.1 32"6
Mercury 00h43m00s 5°46'N Pisces -0.9 6"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2024

The sky on 29 November 2024
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
16:29
Twilight ends
18:07
Twilight begins
05:19

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:07 12:41 17:15
Venus 10:19 14:51 19:24
Moon 05:32 10:23 15:06
Mars 20:33 03:55 11:17
Jupiter 17:00 00:26 07:51
Saturn 12:45 18:18 23:50
All times shown in EST.

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

18 Nov 2010  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
30 Aug 2011  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
28 Oct 2011  –  Jupiter at opposition
25 Dec 2011  –  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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Newark

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40.74°N
74.17°W
EST

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