Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°27' to the north of Mercury.

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 no higher than 2° above the horizon at dusk.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag -0.5, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 13h36m30s 8°55'S Virgo -1.7 30"0
Mercury 13h36m30s 10°22'S Virgo -0.5 4"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Aug 2025

The sky on 27 August 2025
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
19:24
Twilight ends
20:52
Twilight begins
04:51


Waxing Crescent

23%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 11:54 18:42
Venus 03:46 10:44 17:43
Moon 10:37 16:07 21:29
Mars 09:24 15:14 21:04
Jupiter 02:32 09:40 16:47
Saturn 20:35 02:32 08:29
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

05 Jun 2005  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Mar 2006  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
04 May 2006  –  Jupiter at opposition
06 Jul 2006  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

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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