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°47' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From San Diego however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 1° below 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 -8.3, and Mercury at mag 1.4, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h28m10s 10°59'S Libra -8.3 33'24"3
Mercury 14h28m10s 17°46'S Libra 1.4 9"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Oct 2020

The sky on 17 October 2020
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
18:12
Twilight ends
19:34
Twilight begins
05:29

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:14 13:29 18:45
Venus 03:58 10:17 16:35
Moon 07:46 13:34 19:13
Mars 18:04 00:20 06:36
Jupiter 13:21 18:23 23:24
Saturn 13:45 18:49 23:54
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

01 Oct 2020  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
10 Nov 2020  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
10 Nov 2020  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
23 Jan 2021  –  Mercury 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.

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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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