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°58' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 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 3° above the horizon at dusk.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.3, and Mercury at mag -0.6, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h45m10s 23°19'S Sagittarius -8.3 31'11"1
Mercury 18h45m10s 25°17'S Sagittarius -0.6 5"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Dec 2028

The sky on 17 December 2028
Sunrise
07:05
Sunset
16:12
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:23

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:23 12:44 17:06
Venus 05:13 10:01 14:48
Moon 08:27 13:08 17:53
Mars 23:40 05:54 12:07
Jupiter 01:48 07:23 12:58
Saturn 13:25 20:07 02:49
All times shown in EST.

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

18 Oct 2028  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
30 Dec 2028  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
02 Jan 2029  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
01 Feb 2029  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning 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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42.38°N
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