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 2°29' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

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 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.1, and Mercury at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h44m20s 15°35'S Libra -9.1 32'44"5
Mercury 14h44m20s 18°04'S Libra -0.2 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Sep 2025

The sky on 22 September 2025
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
18:48
Twilight ends
20:12
Twilight begins
05:13


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 13:12 19:09
Venus 04:34 11:08 17:41
Moon 07:29 13:22 19:06
Mars 09:04 14:35 20:07
Jupiter 01:10 08:16 15:21
Saturn 18:48 00:43 06:37
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.

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17 Aug 1966  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
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27 Oct 1966  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
03 Dec 1966  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky

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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