Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 8°10' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:31 (PDT) – 1 hour and 21 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:28.

Venus will be at mag -4.4, and Mercury at mag -0.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus 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
Venus 19h24m40s 14°48'S Sagittarius -4.4 58"6
Mercury 19h24m40s 22°59'S Sagittarius -0.3 5"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2025

The sky on 2 July 2025
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Gibbous

51%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:43 21:40
Venus 03:01 09:52 16:42
Moon 13:05 18:54 00:36
Mars 10:20 16:48 23:17
Jupiter 05:18 12:29 19:39
Saturn 00:19 06:17 12:16
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

10 Dec 1997  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
26 Feb 1998  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Mar 1998  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
15 May 1999  –  Venus 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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