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°42' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

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 2° below the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.4, and Mercury at mag 2.2, 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 04h00m20s 19°07'N Taurus -8.4 30'27"2
Mercury 04h00m20s 16°24'N Taurus 2.2 10"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jul 2025

The sky on 5 July 2025
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waxing Gibbous

80%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:43 21:35
Venus 03:00 09:53 16:46
Moon 15:58 21:02 02:00
Mars 10:17 16:43 23:09
Jupiter 05:09 12:20 19:30
Saturn 00:07 06:06 12:05
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

03 May 2002  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
21 Jun 2002  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
26 Jun 2002  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning sky
22 Aug 2002  –  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.

Share