Conjunction of Mercury and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°26' to the south of Neptune.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 15° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.3, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 Neptune 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 13h29m50s 10°05'S Virgo -0.3 5"0
Neptune 13h29m50s 7°39'S Virgo 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Sep 2025

The sky on 9 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 12:38 19:02
Venus 04:10 10:57 17:45
Moon 19:48 02:05 08:32
Mars 09:13 14:54 20:34
Jupiter 01:52 08:58 16:05
Saturn 19:42 01:37 07:33
All times shown in PDT.

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.

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14 Apr 1954  –  Neptune at opposition
05 Jul 1954  –  Neptune 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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