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 2°56' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:02 (EDT), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 17 minutes after the Sun at 21:01.

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 -8.4, and Mercury at mag -1.0, both in the constellation Aries.

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 03h13m20s 22°37'N Aries -8.4 30'40"5
Mercury 03h13m20s 19°41'N Aries -1.0 5"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Apr 2028

The sky on 26 April 2028
Sunrise
05:54
Sunset
19:44
Twilight ends
21:28
Twilight begins
04:10

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:31 13:49 21:06
Venus 07:34 15:27 23:19
Moon 06:31 14:17 22:10
Mars 05:38 12:19 19:00
Jupiter 15:22 21:47 04:12
Saturn 05:54 12:32 19:10
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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09 May 2028  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
26 Jun 2028  –  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
EDT

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