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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 2°32' to the north of Mercury.

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 5° above the horizon at dusk.

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Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 12h03m50s 0°47'N Virgo -1.7 30"3
Mercury 12h03m50s 1°45'S Virgo 0.0 6"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Aug 2028

The sky on 28 August 2028
Sunrise
06:13
Sunset
19:31
Twilight ends
21:10
Twilight begins
04:33

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

75%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:27 14:25 20:22
Venus 02:35 09:51 17:08
Moon 15:47 20:18 00:50
Mars 02:46 10:12 17:38
Jupiter 08:20 14:26 20:32
Saturn 22:13 05:01 11:50
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

13 May 2028  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
10 Feb 2029  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
11 Apr 2029  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 Jun 2029  –  Jupiter 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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