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 5°52' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:36 (PDT), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 47 minutes after the Sun at 21:50.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 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 07h02m00s 18°12'N Gemini -9.2 29'24"6
Mercury 07h02m00s 24°05'N Gemini 0.3 7"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Aug 2025

The sky on 25 August 2025
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
19:26
Twilight ends
20:55
Twilight begins
04:49


Waxing Crescent

9%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:59 11:49 18:38
Venus 03:42 10:42 17:42
Moon 08:42 14:45 20:39
Mars 09:26 15:17 21:08
Jupiter 02:38 09:46 16:54
Saturn 20:44 02:40 08:37
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

08 Jun 2013  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
12 Jun 2013  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
30 Jul 2013  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
01 Aug 2013  –  Mercury 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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