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°44' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

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.

The Moon will be at mag -7.9, and Mercury at mag 3.4, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible 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 04h55m10s 20°02'N Taurus -7.9 33'17"7
Mercury 04h55m10s 22°47'N Taurus 3.4 11"3

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 12 Sep 2025

The sky on 12 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:27
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Gibbous

59%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 12:47 19:05
Venus 04:15 11:00 17:44
Moon 21:29 04:44 12:09
Mars 09:11 14:49 20:28
Jupiter 01:42 08:49 15:55
Saturn 19:30 01:25 07:20
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

08 May 1982  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
26 Jun 1982  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
01 Jul 1982  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Aug 1982  –  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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