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 6°02' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 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 1° above 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 -8.7 in the constellation Pisces, and Mercury at mag -0.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 23h41m10s 1°21'N Pisces -8.7 30'37"5
Mercury 23h41m10s 4°41'S Aquarius -0.2 5"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Apr 2027

The sky on 5 April 2027
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:21
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:52

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:53 11:40 17:27
Venus 05:19 10:53 16:28
Moon 05:39 11:49 18:10
Mars 14:25 21:32 04:40
Jupiter 14:09 21:14 04:19
Saturn 06:44 13:04 19:23
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

17 Mar 2027  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
25 May 2027  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
28 May 2027  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
15 Jul 2027  –  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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