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 6°38' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 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 dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.8 in the constellation Aquarius, and Mercury at mag -0.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 20h45m30s 12°55'S Aquarius -8.8 31'33"7
Mercury 20h45m30s 19°33'S Capricornus -0.2 5"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Sep 2025

The sky on 6 September 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:36
Twilight begins
05:00


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 12:28 18:59
Venus 04:04 10:54 17:45
Moon 18:50 00:27 06:14
Mars 09:16 14:58 20:41
Jupiter 02:01 09:08 16:15
Saturn 19:54 01:50 07:46
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

28 Jan 1977  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
10 Apr 1977  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
10 Apr 1977  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
27 May 1977  –  Mercury 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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