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 7°05' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 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 -8.3 in the constellation Capricornus, and Mercury at mag 2.6 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

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 21h09m00s 19°53'S Capricornus -8.3 33'25"0
Mercury 21h09m00s 12°48'S Aquarius 2.6 10"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2025

The sky on 1 July 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Crescent

48%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:43 21:41
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:41
Moon 12:09 18:15 00:12
Mars 10:21 16:50 23:19
Jupiter 05:21 12:31 19:42
Saturn 00:22 06:21 12:20
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.

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07 Mar 1988  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
17 May 1988  –  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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