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°03' 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 0° below the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7 in the constellation Aries, and Mercury at mag 1.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 02h15m50s 12°31'N Aries -8.7 29'31"2
Mercury 02h15m50s 10°27'N Cetus 1.7 10"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Sep 2025

The sky on 4 September 2025
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:39
Twilight begins
04:58


Waxing Gibbous

91%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 12:21 18:56
Venus 04:00 10:52 17:45
Moon 17:45 22:48 03:57
Mars 09:17 15:01 20:45
Jupiter 02:07 09:14 16:21
Saturn 20:03 01:58 07:54
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

10 Apr 1977  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
27 May 1977  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
02 Jun 1977  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
30 Jul 1977  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening 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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