Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 5°27' to the north of Mercury.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:11 (EST) – 1 hour and 53 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:36.
Venus will be at mag -4.5, and Mercury at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Sagittarius.
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 Venus 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 |
| Venus | 18h35m20s | 16°33'S | Sagittarius | -4.5 | 54"6 |
| Mercury | 18h35m20s | 22°00'S | Sagittarius | -0.2 | 6"6 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.
The sky on 22 Jan 2030
| The sky on 22 January 2030 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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84% 18 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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.
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Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.