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

Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 2°29' to the south of Saturn.

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 8° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mercury will be at mag -0.6, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Mercury and Saturn 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
Mercury 19h00m30s 24°53'S Sagittarius -0.6 5"8
Saturn 19h00m30s 22°23'S Sagittarius 0.5 15"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jul 2025

The sky on 13 July 2025
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:06

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:29 21:12
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:57
Moon 21:50 03:06 08:30
Mars 10:08 16:29 22:50
Jupiter 04:46 11:56 19:06
Saturn 23:36 05:35 11:33
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

11 Sep 1989  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
04 May 1990  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
14 Jul 1990  –  Saturn at opposition
22 Sep 1990  –  Saturn 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:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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