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 23' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 1 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:59 (EDT), 11° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 20 minutes after the Sun at 19:02.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Mercury at mag -1.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 23h45m30s 1°39'S Pisces -8.5 32'57"5
Mercury 23h45m30s 1°15'S Pisces -1.0 6"0

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

The sky on 28 Feb 2025

The sky on 28 February 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
17:42
Twilight ends
19:14
Twilight begins
04:54

30-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:03 13:00 18:58
Venus 07:06 13:45 20:25
Moon 06:51 12:40 18:43
Mars 12:47 20:31 04:15
Jupiter 10:33 17:58 01:24
Saturn 07:01 12:45 18:28
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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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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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