Conjunction of Mercury and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 6°23' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 21° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.3, and 134340 Pluto at mag 14.7, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and 134340 Pluto 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
Mercury 18h18m00s 25°12'S Sagittarius -0.3 7"3
134340 Pluto 18h18m00s 18°48'S Sagittarius 14.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2025

The sky on 6 July 2025
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00


Waxing Gibbous

89%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:42 21:33
Venus 03:00 09:54 16:48
Moon 16:58 21:49 02:37
Mars 10:16 16:41 23:07
Jupiter 05:06 12:17 19:27
Saturn 00:03 06:02 12:01
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

25 Jun 2010  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
27 Jun 2011  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
29 Jun 2012  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
01 Jul 2013  –  134340 Pluto at opposition

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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