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 47' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:08 (PDT) – 1 hour and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:27.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 16h37m10s 20°53'S Ophiuchus -9.2 33'10"1
Mercury 16h37m10s 20°05'S Ophiuchus -0.4 6"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2025

The sky on 4 July 2025
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waxing Gibbous

72%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:49 14:43 21:37
Venus 03:00 09:53 16:45
Moon 14:59 20:17 01:28
Mars 10:18 16:45 23:12
Jupiter 05:12 12:23 19:33
Saturn 00:11 06:10 12:08
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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06 Mar 2058  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
17 Apr 2058  –  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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