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

Conjunction of Saturn and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Saturn and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 2°26' 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 no higher than 10° above the horizon at dusk.

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Saturn will be at mag -0.0, and Mercury at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 Saturn 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
Saturn 06h28m50s 22°42'N Gemini -0.0 16"7
Mercury 06h28m50s 25°09'N Gemini 0.1 7"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jun 2033

The sky on 3 June 2033
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:15
Twilight ends
22:26
Twilight begins
02:56

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

44%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 14:21 22:07
Venus 03:05 09:39 16:13
Moon 11:18 18:01 00:37
Mars 22:29 02:48 07:06
Jupiter 01:02 06:28 11:53
Saturn 06:49 14:23 21:56
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

01 Mar 2033  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
02 Nov 2033  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
07 Jan 2034  –  Saturn at opposition
15 Mar 2034  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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