Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°03' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From London 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 dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag -0.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 the Moon 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
The Moon 04h19m40s 17°41'N Taurus -9.2 32'53"4
Mercury 04h19m40s 18°45'N Taurus -0.1 7"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:09
Twilight ends
22:28
Twilight begins
03:28


Waning Crescent

17%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 11:19 17:23
Venus 04:28 10:36 16:43
Moon 04:22 09:10 14:13
Mars 11:05 19:10 03:16
Jupiter 07:55 16:07 00:19
Saturn 04:56 10:44 16:32
All times shown in BST.

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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07 Aug 1963  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
24 Aug 1963  –  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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