Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°11' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:19 (PDT) – 1 hour and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:32.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 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 16h57m30s 21°48'S Ophiuchus -3.9 10"9
Mercury 16h57m30s 20°36'S Ophiuchus -0.4 6"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Aug 2025

The sky on 23 August 2025
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
20:58
Twilight begins
04:47


Waxing Crescent

0%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:35
Venus 03:39 10:40 17:41
Moon 06:42 13:21 19:50
Mars 09:27 15:20 21:13
Jupiter 02:44 09:52 17:00
Saturn 20:52 02:49 08:45
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

01 Sep 2004  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
03 Nov 2005  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Dec 2005  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
24 Feb 2006  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning 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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