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 2°30' 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 no higher than 5° above 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 -1.8, and Mercury at mag -0.5, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 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 17h08m10s 22°31'S Ophiuchus -1.8 30"8
Mercury 17h08m10s 25°02'S Ophiuchus -0.5 5"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Sep 2025

The sky on 10 September 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:04

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:18 12:41 19:03
Venus 04:11 10:58 17:45
Moon 20:18 02:55 09:42
Mars 09:13 14:52 20:32
Jupiter 01:48 08:55 16:02
Saturn 19:38 01:33 07:29
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

28 Jul 1983  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
29 Apr 1984  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
29 Jun 1984  –  Jupiter at opposition
29 Aug 1984  –  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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