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

Conjunction of Mercury and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 4'48" to the south of Mars.

From Ashburn 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.

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Mercury will be at mag -0.5, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Mars 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 10h57m00s 7°41'N Leo -0.5 5"2
Mars 10h57m00s 7°46'N Leo 1.8 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Aug 2021

The sky on 19 August 2021
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:37
Twilight begins
04:45

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

90%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:49 14:16 20:43
Venus 09:31 15:31 21:30
Moon 18:29 23:11 03:57
Mars 07:46 14:14 20:42
Jupiter 19:59 01:17 06:34
Saturn 19:05 00:04 05:02
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

13 Nov 2020  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
30 Oct 2022  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee
08 Dec 2022  –  Mars at opposition

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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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