The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 5°31' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Mercury at mag 1.5, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter 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
Jupiter 12h47m40s 3°55'S Virgo -1.7 30"0
Mercury 12h47m40s 9°27'S Virgo 1.5 9"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Sep 2025

The sky on 9 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:03

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 12:38 19:02
Venus 04:10 10:57 17:45
Moon 19:48 02:05 08:32
Mars 09:13 14:54 20:34
Jupiter 01:52 08:58 16:05
Saturn 19:42 01:37 07:33
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

23 May 1969  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
19 Feb 1970  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
21 Apr 1970  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Jun 1970  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
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34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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