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 1°13' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From San Diego 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 dusk.

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 -9.2, and Mercury at mag 0.9, 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 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 13h00m50s 11°57'S Virgo -9.2 33'12"1
Mercury 13h00m50s 10°44'S Virgo 0.9 9"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Sep 2028

The sky on 19 September 2028
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
18:48
Twilight ends
20:10
Twilight begins
05:09

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

5%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:17 13:52 19:27
Venus 03:16 10:01 16:46
Moon 07:37 13:29 19:13
Mars 02:45 09:39 16:33
Jupiter 07:12 13:12 19:12
Saturn 20:52 03:27 10:03
All times shown in PDT.

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

05 Sep 2028  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
17 Oct 2028  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
18 Oct 2028  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
30 Dec 2028  –  Mercury 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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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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