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 5°41' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dawn.

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 -8.9, and Mercury at mag -0.1, both in the constellation Aries.

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 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 02h54m30s 19°20'N Aries -8.9 29'24"5
Mercury 02h54m30s 13°38'N Aries -0.1 6"8

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

The sky on 30 May 2030

The sky on 30 May 2030
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:19
Twilight begins
03:18

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:24 11:16 18:09
Venus 03:44 10:24 17:04
Moon 04:11 11:33 19:00
Mars 05:17 12:42 20:08
Jupiter 18:28 23:30 04:33
Saturn 05:00 12:10 19:20
All times shown in EDT.

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 May 2030  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
22 Jul 2030  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
01 Aug 2030  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
15 Sep 2030  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west

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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41.14°N
73.26°W
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