Mercury meets Jupiter in the Dusk

From the photographer: “Mercury (on the right) appears close to Jupiter in the dusk. The visual line-of-sight distance between them in the sky on March 15 2011 was about 2-degrees. Cirrus clouds from the west forecast rain for the next day.”

Editor’s note: Mercury and Jupiter were approximately 1.1AU and 5.9AU from Earth, respectively, on 2011 March 15. Since 1 Astronomical Unit (AU) = 92,955,887.6 miles, the actual distance between the two planets was more than 446 million miles.