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 4°23' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Columbus 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 dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5 in the constellation Pisces, and Mercury at mag 0.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 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 00h36m50s 5°21'N Pisces -9.5 33'12"2
Mercury 00h36m50s 0°57'N Cetus 0.2 7"3

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

The sky on 25 Apr 2025

The sky on 25 April 2025
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
20:20
Twilight ends
22:01
Twilight begins
04:56


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:45 11:51 17:57
Venus 04:57 11:02 17:08
Moon 05:22 11:31 17:54
Mars 12:16 19:37 02:58
Jupiter 09:05 16:31 23:57
Saturn 05:15 11:08 17:01
All times shown in EDT.

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.

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04 Jul 2025  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
19 Aug 2025  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west

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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