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

Conjunction of Mercury and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°35' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 19° from it.

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Mercury will be at mag -0.3, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Neptune 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 22h38m50s 10°55'S Aquarius -0.3 5"4
Neptune 22h38m50s 9°19'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:49
Twilight begins
05:04

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

80%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:05 13:55 20:44
Venus 06:07 11:54 17:41
Moon 22:53 03:44 08:28
Mars 05:27 10:51 16:16
Jupiter 08:18 15:19 22:20
Saturn 05:48 11:22 16:56
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

16 Nov 2014  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
12 Jun 2015  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
31 Aug 2015  –  Neptune at opposition
18 Nov 2015  –  Neptune 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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