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

Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°22' to the south of Mercury.

From Ashburn , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:44 (EDT), 8° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 13 minutes after the Sun at 21:37.

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

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag -0.9, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Venus 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
Venus 05h11m20s 23°33'N Taurus -3.9 10"1
Mercury 05h11m20s 24°56'N Taurus -0.9 5"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
05:25

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

80%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 14:12 20:58
Venus 06:23 12:11 17:59
Moon 23:04 04:01 08:52
Mars 05:41 11:08 16:35
Jupiter 08:39 15:36 22:33
Saturn 06:03 11:39 17:15
All times shown in EDT.

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

03 Sep 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
31 Oct 2013  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Dec 2013  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
18 Feb 2014  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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