Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°24' to the south of Uranus.
From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 5° below the horizon at dawn.
Mercury will be at mag -0.2 in the constellation Pisces, and Uranus at mag 5.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.
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 Uranus 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 | 01h50m50s | 8°26'N | Pisces | -0.2 | 6"4 |
| Uranus | 01h50m50s | 10°50'N | Aries | 5.9 | 3"3 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
The sky on 12 May 2018
| The sky on 12 May 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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5% 26 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 02 Jan 2018 | – Uranus ends retrograde motion |
| 07 Aug 2018 | – Uranus enters retrograde motion |
| 23 Oct 2018 | – Uranus at opposition |
| 06 Jan 2019 | – Uranus 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.