Conjunction of Saturn and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 11' to the north of Mercury.

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 12° from it.

Saturn will be at mag 0.2, and Mercury at mag 3.4, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn 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
Saturn 02h50m20s 14°08'N Aries 0.2 16"3
Mercury 02h50m20s 13°57'N Aries 3.4 11"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

70%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
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.

Related news

03 Jan 1970  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
04 Sep 1970  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
11 Nov 1970  –  Saturn at opposition
17 Jan 1971  –  Saturn 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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