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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°49' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Seattle 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 dawn.

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 -9.4, and Mercury at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h18m40s 8°56'N Pisces -9.4 32'52"4
Mercury 01h18m40s 5°07'N Pisces 0.6 8"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 6 May 2024

The sky on 6 May 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:42
Twilight begins
03:28

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 11:28 17:55
Venus 05:31 12:35 19:39
Moon 04:51 11:50 19:08
Mars 04:21 10:27 16:33
Jupiter 06:11 13:40 21:09
Saturn 03:50 09:23 14:56
All times shown in PDT.

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

25 Mar 2024  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
09 May 2024  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
19 May 2024  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
09 Jul 2024  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky

Image credit

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

Share

Seattle

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

47.61°N
122.33°W
PDT

Color scheme