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

Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°51' to the north of Saturn.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mercury will be at mag -1.1, and Saturn at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Mercury and Saturn 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
Mercury 05h34m50s 25°06'N Taurus -1.1 5"4
Saturn 05h34m50s 22°15'N Taurus -0.0 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jun 2032

The sky on 2 June 2032
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:15
Twilight ends
22:25
Twilight begins
02:56

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

25%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:47 13:33 21:18
Venus 05:10 12:40 20:11
Moon 01:47 08:05 14:33
Mars 05:48 13:28 21:08
Jupiter 23:28 04:13 08:58
Saturn 06:01 13:32 21:03
All times shown in EDT.

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

16 Feb 2032  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
18 Oct 2032  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
24 Dec 2032  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Mar 2033  –  Saturn 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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