The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°07' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.
From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 16:46 (EST), 9° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 27 minutes after the Sun at 17:50.
The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Mercury at mag -0.7, both in the constellation Capricornus.
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 | 20h18m30s | 24°14'S | Capricornus | -8.9 | 32'58"5 |
| Mercury | 20h18m30s | 21°07'S | Capricornus | -0.7 | 6"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.
The sky on 3 Jan 2022
| The sky on 3 January 2022 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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4% 1 day old |
All times shown in EST.
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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
| 24 Oct 2021 | – Mercury at greatest elongation west |
| 07 Jan 2022 | – Mercury at greatest elongation east |
| 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.