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 25' to the north of Mercury. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:29 (PDT), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 46 minutes after the Sun at 21:45.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 06h38m50s 25°22'N Gemini -9.2 31'34"8
Mercury 06h38m50s 24°57'N Gemini 0.1 7"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2025

The sky on 1 July 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Crescent

48%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:43 21:41
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:41
Moon 12:09 18:15 00:12
Mars 10:21 16:50 23:19
Jupiter 05:21 12:31 19:42
Saturn 00:22 06:21 12:20
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

29 Mar 2046  –  Mercury at greatest elongation west
07 Jun 2046  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky
10 Jun 2046  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
28 Jul 2046  –  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.

Share