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 7°39' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 0° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.8, and Mercury at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h32m40s 25°30'N Taurus -8.8 31'27"5
Mercury 04h32m40s 17°50'N Taurus 1.1 9"2

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

The sky on 21 Jun 2028

The sky on 21 June 2028
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:49

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:04 11:16 18:28
Venus 03:38 10:48 17:59
Moon 03:37 11:40 19:45
Mars 03:44 11:14 18:44
Jupiter 11:41 18:04 00:27
Saturn 02:20 09:08 15:55
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

09 May 2028  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
26 Jun 2028  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
02 Jul 2028  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
25 Aug 2028  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky

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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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