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 3°28' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:34 (PDT), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 23 minutes after the Sun at 21:29.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Mercury at mag -0.1, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h10m50s 13°44'N Cancer -9.5 32'59"6
Mercury 09h10m50s 17°12'N Cancer -0.1 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jul 2025

The sky on 8 July 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
04:02


Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:39 21:28
Venus 03:00 09:55 16:50
Moon 18:55 23:34 04:13
Mars 10:13 16:38 23:02
Jupiter 05:00 12:11 19:21
Saturn 23:55 05:54 11:53
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

17 May 1991  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
16 Jul 1991  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
24 Jul 1991  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
07 Sep 1991  –  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.

Share