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

Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 5°25' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:14 (PDT) – 1 hour and 7 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:03.

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Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Mercury at mag -0.8, 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 Venus 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
Venus 14h06m30s 16°04'S Virgo -4.3 59"2
Mercury 14h06m30s 10°38'S Virgo -0.8 5"8

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

The sky on 12 Jul 2025

The sky on 12 July 2025
Sunrise
05:47
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:05

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

93%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:31 21:15
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:56
Moon 21:15 02:16 07:23
Mars 10:09 16:31 22:53
Jupiter 04:49 11:59 19:09
Saturn 23:40 05:38 11:37
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

24 Aug 1994  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
21 Dec 1994  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
13 Jan 1995  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
31 Mar 1996  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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