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

Conjunction of Mercury and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°03' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 16° from it.

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Mercury will be at mag -0.5, and Neptune at mag 8.0, 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 through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Neptune 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
Mercury 00h18m00s 0°33'S Pisces -0.5 5"4
Neptune 00h18m00s 0°29'N Pisces 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Apr 2027

The sky on 11 April 2027
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
21:05
Twilight begins
04:40

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

28%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:52 11:53 17:55
Venus 05:13 10:57 16:41
Moon 08:58 17:06 01:14
Mars 14:05 21:10 04:16
Jupiter 13:45 20:50 03:55
Saturn 06:23 12:43 19:03
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.

Related news

12 Dec 2026  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
09 Jul 2027  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
28 Sep 2027  –  Neptune at opposition
15 Dec 2027  –  Neptune 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
EDT

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