Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 6°48' 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 4° below the horizon at dusk.
Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Mercury at mag -0.3, 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 Venus 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 |
| Venus | 14h16m20s | 21°32'S | Virgo | -4.3 | 56"4 |
| Mercury | 14h16m20s | 14°43'S | Virgo | -0.3 | 5"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.
The sky on 14 Oct 2018
| The sky on 14 October 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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34% 5 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 17 Aug 2018 | – Venus at greatest elongation east |
| 13 Dec 2018 | – Venus at highest altitude in morning sky |
| 06 Jan 2019 | – Venus at greatest elongation west |
| 24 Mar 2020 | – Venus at greatest elongation east |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.