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

Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°28' to the north of Mercury.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 13° from it.

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Venus will be at mag -4.1, and Mercury at mag 3.3, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Venus 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
Venus 04h57m30s 25°19'N Taurus -4.1 55"7
Mercury 04h57m30s 22°51'N Taurus 3.3 11"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 May 2028

The sky on 23 May 2028
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:11
Twilight ends
22:11
Twilight begins
03:26

29-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:12 13:43 21:13
Venus 06:02 13:44 21:25
Moon 04:34 12:09 19:51
Mars 04:45 11:51 18:57
Jupiter 13:34 19:59 02:25
Saturn 04:16 10:58 17:40
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

24 Mar 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Aug 2028  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
01 Sep 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Oct 2029  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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