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 1°54' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield 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 -9.4, and Mercury at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h41m10s 5°08'N Pisces -9.4 30'01"6
Mercury 01h41m10s 7°02'N Pisces 0.4 8"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 1 May 2025

The sky on 1 May 2025
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:36
Twilight begins
04:01


Waxing Crescent

27%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:01 11:17 17:33
Venus 04:06 10:13 16:19
Moon 08:39 16:46 00:50
Mars 11:25 18:46 02:07
Jupiter 08:04 15:34 23:04
Saturn 04:15 10:08 16:01
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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25 Jul 2037  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east

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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