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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°51' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 0° above the horizon at dusk.

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 -7.9, and Mercury at mag -0.5, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h49m50s 5°57'S Virgo -7.9 31'46"4
Mercury 13h49m50s 11°48'S Virgo -0.5 4"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Oct 2018

The sky on 9 October 2018
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
18:22
Twilight ends
19:53
Twilight begins
05:24

30-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

2%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:05 13:27 18:49
Venus 09:20 14:01 18:42
Moon 07:12 13:13 19:06
Mars 15:45 20:29 01:14
Jupiter 10:07 15:04 20:02
Saturn 13:15 17:52 22:30
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

28 Aug 2018  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
06 Nov 2018  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
10 Nov 2018  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
13 Dec 2018  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky

Image credit

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

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme