Mercury and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°08' to the north of Uranus.
From Cambridge, the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible around 19:47 (EDT), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 16 minutes after the Sun at 20:44.
Mercury will be at mag -1.0, and Uranus at mag 5.9, both in the constellation Aries.
The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.
A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Uranus 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|
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.
|The sky on 18 April 2022|
17 days old
All times shown in EDT.
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.
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.
|04 Nov 2021||– Uranus at opposition|
|09 Nov 2022||– Uranus at opposition|
|13 Nov 2023||– Uranus at opposition|
|16 Nov 2024||– Uranus at opposition|
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.