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

Conjunction of Mercury and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°16' to the south of Uranus.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 17° from it.

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Mercury will be at mag -0.7, and Uranus at mag 5.8, 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 Mercury and Uranus 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
Mercury 04h55m00s 21°19'N Taurus -0.7 5"9
Uranus 04h55m00s 22°36'N Taurus 5.8 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jun 2029

The sky on 23 June 2029
Sunrise
05:05
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:49

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

95%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:02 11:29 18:56
Venus 06:56 14:28 22:00
Moon 18:15 22:47 03:15
Mars 13:04 18:58 00:52
Jupiter 13:57 19:40 01:23
Saturn 02:46 09:49 16:52
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

16 Feb 2029  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
23 Sep 2029  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
08 Dec 2029  –  Uranus at opposition
20 Feb 2030  –  Uranus 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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