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

Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 5°27' to the north of Mercury.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:31 (EDT) – 1 hour and 48 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:55.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

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
Sunrise
07:19
Sunset
17:53
Twilight ends
19:17
Twilight begins
05:55

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 10:52 16:01
Venus 05:31 10:53 16:16
Moon 20:09 02:38 08:59
Mars 08:58 14:32 20:07
Jupiter 02:24 07:44 13:04
Saturn 12:41 19:20 01:59
All times shown in EST.

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

27 Nov 2029  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
19 Feb 2030  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
18 Mar 2030  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
16 May 2031  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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Jacksonville

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EDT

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