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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 7'04" to the north of Mercury.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 2° above the horizon at dawn.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, and Mercury at mag -1.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 03h59m40s 19°50'N Taurus -2.0 32"0
Mercury 03h59m40s 19°43'N Taurus -1.1 5"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jun 2024

The sky on 4 June 2024
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:21
Twilight ends
22:26
Twilight begins
03:13

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:43 12:00 19:17
Venus 05:21 12:49 20:18
Moon 03:42 11:02 18:36
Mars 03:03 09:38 16:13
Jupiter 04:41 11:58 19:15
Saturn 01:39 07:20 13:01
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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07 Dec 2024  –  Jupiter at opposition
04 Feb 2025  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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