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 1°38' to the south of Mercury.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Mercury at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Leo.

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 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 09h46m00s 9°03'N Leo -4.3 50"2
Mercury 09h46m00s 10°42'N Leo 1.0 9"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Jul 2031

The sky on 24 July 2031
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
22:13
Twilight begins
03:23

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

27%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:38 14:21 21:04
Venus 07:44 14:21 20:58
Moon 10:28 16:29 22:22
Mars 14:20 19:16 00:12
Jupiter 17:14 21:48 02:22
Saturn 02:17 09:45 17:13
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

02 Jun 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
19 Oct 2031  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
21 Oct 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
07 Jan 2033  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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