Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°49' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Venus 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
Venus 18h50m20s 22°50'S Sagittarius -3.9 10"6
Mercury 18h50m20s 20°01'S Sagittarius 0.5 8"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Aug 2025

The sky on 13 August 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:12
Twilight begins
04:37


Waning Gibbous

70%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:56 11:46 18:36
Venus 03:24 10:29 17:35
Moon 21:47 04:11 10:46
Mars 09:37 15:36 21:36
Jupiter 03:14 10:23 17:32
Saturn 21:32 03:30 09:27
All times shown in PDT.

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

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18 Nov 1957  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
21 Dec 1957  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
08 Apr 1958  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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