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 34' to the south of Mercury.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dusk.

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Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag -0.6, both in the constellation Leo.

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 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 10h05m10s 12°40'N Leo -1.7 30"3
Mercury 10h05m10s 13°15'N Leo -0.6 5"2

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

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:43
Twilight begins
04:53

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

80%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:54 13:46 20:38
Venus 05:59 11:45 17:31
Moon 22:47 03:35 08:15
Mars 05:20 10:43 16:05
Jupiter 08:06 15:10 22:14
Saturn 05:41 11:14 16:47
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

08 Apr 2015  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
07 Jan 2016  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 Mar 2016  –  Jupiter at opposition
09 May 2016  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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