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 3°13' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

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 -9.0, and Mercury at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h44m00s 22°43'N Cancer -9.0 30'18"6
Mercury 08h44m00s 19°30'N Cancer -0.2 6"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
03:19

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 14:31 21:47
Venus 06:08 13:35 21:03
Moon 06:50 14:31 22:02
Mars 01:56 09:01 16:07
Jupiter 02:57 10:19 17:42
Saturn 23:31 05:12 10:53
All times shown in EDT.

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

14 May 2024  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
12 Jul 2024  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
21 Jul 2024  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
04 Sep 2024  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west

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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