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 2°46' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:39 (EST), 11° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 41 minutes after the Sun at 21:54.

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 -8.8, and Mercury at mag -0.5, both in the constellation Taurus.

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

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 05h30m30s 22°44'N Taurus -8.8 30'26"8
Mercury 05h30m30s 25°31'N Taurus -0.5 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 24 May 2020

The sky on 24 May 2020
Sunrise
05:24
Sunset
20:13
Twilight ends
22:13
Twilight begins
03:25

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

4%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:31 14:13 21:56
Venus 06:10 13:53 21:35
Moon 06:52 14:29 22:10
Mars 01:58 07:23 12:47
Jupiter 23:53 04:38 09:24
Saturn 00:09 04:58 09:47
All times shown in EDT.

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

23 Mar 2020  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
01 Jun 2020  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
04 Jun 2020  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
22 Jul 2020  –  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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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