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

Close approach of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Mercury will make a close approach, passing within 1°10' of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Mercury, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 2 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 0° above the horizon at dusk.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.4; and Mercury will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mercury around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 12h38m40s 9°18'S Virgo -9.4 31'38"5
Mercury 12h40m20s 8°12'S Virgo 0.4 8"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Jun 2024

The sky on 24 June 2024
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:38
Twilight begins
03:10

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

89%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:08 13:45 21:22
Venus 05:43 13:17 20:52
Moon 22:27 03:02 07:43
Mars 02:21 09:16 16:10
Jupiter 03:38 10:59 18:19
Saturn 00:22 06:03 11:45
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.

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26 Dec 2048  –  Mercury 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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