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 1°39' to the north of Saturn.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 2° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mercury will be at mag -1.1, and Saturn at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h26m00s 4°04'S Aquarius -1.1 5"6
Saturn 23h26m00s 5°44'S Aquarius 1.1 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Feb 2025

The sky on 25 February 2025
Sunrise
06:23
Sunset
17:28
Twilight ends
19:02
Twilight begins
04:50

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 12:45 18:33
Venus 07:09 13:48 20:27
Moon 05:26 09:54 14:30
Mars 12:44 20:34 04:23
Jupiter 10:31 18:01 01:30
Saturn 07:05 12:47 18:29
All times shown in EST.

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.

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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
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