The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°09' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will become visible at around 19:35 (PST), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 12 minutes after the Sun at 20:31.

The Moon will be at mag -8.3 in the constellation Pisces, and Mercury at mag -1.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.

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

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon 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:

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

The sky on 8 Apr 2016

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

Image credit

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

Share