Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 21' to the north of Saturn.

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

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 6° above the horizon at dusk.

Mercury will be at mag -0.4, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 Mercury and Saturn 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
Mercury 09h21m30s 16°50'N Cancer -0.4 5"7
Saturn 09h21m30s 16°29'N Cancer 0.4 16"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Gemini 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.

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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25 Apr 1978  –  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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