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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 2°39' to the north of Mercury.

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 3° above the horizon at dusk.

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Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Scorpius.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 16h06m00s 20°13'S Scorpius -1.7 30"6
Mercury 16h06m00s 22°53'S Scorpius -0.4 5"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Nov 2030

The sky on 9 November 2030
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
16:39
Twilight ends
18:13
Twilight begins
04:56

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:04 12:41 17:18
Venus 06:58 11:56 16:54
Moon 16:19 23:34 06:56
Mars 01:55 08:13 14:31
Jupiter 07:54 12:43 17:31
Saturn 17:44 00:59 08:13
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

14 Jul 2030  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
15 Apr 2031  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
15 Jun 2031  –  Jupiter at opposition
16 Aug 2031  –  Jupiter 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
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