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

Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°23' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:33 (EST) – 1 hour and 37 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:43.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Mercury at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 the Moon 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
The Moon 16h59m50s 27°35'S Ophiuchus -9.0 30'25"6
Mercury 16h59m50s 21°12'S Ophiuchus -0.4 6"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Dec 2024

The sky on 28 December 2024
Sunrise
07:10
Sunset
16:18
Twilight ends
18:00
Twilight begins
05:29

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 10:11 14:52
Venus 09:53 14:59 20:06
Moon 05:24 09:41 13:54
Mars 18:02 01:38 09:14
Jupiter 14:30 21:59 05:28
Saturn 10:43 16:16 21:50
All times shown in EST.

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.

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07 Mar 2025  –  Mercury at greatest elongation east
19 Apr 2025  –  Mercury at highest altitude in morning 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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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