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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°17' to the north of Mercury.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:13 (PDT), 11° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 28 minutes after the Sun at 18:20.

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 -1.9, and Mercury at mag -0.7, 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 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 20h03m10s 20°50'S Sagittarius -1.9 31"9
Mercury 20h03m10s 22°07'S Sagittarius -0.7 6"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 Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

76%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
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

07 Sep 2008  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
15 Jun 2009  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
14 Aug 2009  –  Jupiter at opposition
12 Oct 2009  –  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.

Share

South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

Color scheme