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 1°13' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 06:22 (EDT) – 1 hour and 15 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:18.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Mercury at mag -0.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h40m20s 7°07'S Virgo -8.5 32'53"8
Mercury 13h40m20s 8°21'S Virgo -0.8 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Nov 2021

The sky on 3 November 2021
Sunrise
07:37
Sunset
18:06
Twilight ends
19:37
Twilight begins
06:06

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:21 11:57 17:33
Venus 11:42 16:07 20:32
Moon 05:54 11:51 17:37
Mars 06:55 12:18 17:42
Jupiter 14:44 19:56 01:09
Saturn 13:57 18:54 23:52
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.

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09 Jan 2022  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
09 Feb 2022  –  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.

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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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