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°34' to the north 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 20° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.4, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.5, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h38m20s 16°12'S Capricornus -0.4 5"1
134340 Pluto 21h38m20s 22°46'S Capricornus 15.5 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jun 2025

The sky on 2 June 2025
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
03:56


Waxing Gibbous

54%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:54 13:07 20:20
Venus 03:22 09:47 16:12
Moon 12:24 18:58 01:23
Mars 10:56 17:43 00:29
Jupiter 06:46 13:57 21:07
Saturn 02:13 08:11 14:08
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.

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13 Aug 2037  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
15 Aug 2038  –  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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