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

Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°35' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 19:25 (PDT), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 24 minutes after the Sun at 20:30.

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

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Mercury at mag -0.6, both in the constellation Pisces.

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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 01h36m50s 5°42'N Pisces -8.6 32'43"8
Mercury 01h36m50s 12°18'N Pisces -0.6 6"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2017

The sky on 29 March 2017
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:15

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 13:57 20:33
Venus 05:50 12:14 18:37
Moon 07:55 14:28 21:08
Mars 08:17 15:03 21:50
Jupiter 19:46 01:34 07:21
Saturn 01:06 06:09 11:11
All times shown in PDT.

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

19 Jan 2017  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
01 Apr 2017  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
31 Mar 2017  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
17 May 2017  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west

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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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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