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 Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mercury and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 41' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 3° below the horizon at dawn.

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Mercury will be at mag 0.5, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and Neptune 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 00h03m00s 1°45'S Pisces 0.5 8"6
Neptune 00h03m00s 1°03'S Pisces 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Apr 2025

The sky on 16 April 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:33
Twilight ends
21:13
Twilight begins
04:30

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:18 11:15 17:12
Venus 04:39 10:46 16:54
Moon 22:40 03:09 07:32
Mars 11:49 19:18 02:47
Jupiter 08:52 16:21 23:50
Saturn 05:10 11:01 16:52
All times shown in EDT.

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 Dec 2024  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
04 Jul 2025  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
23 Sep 2025  –  Neptune at opposition
10 Dec 2025  –  Neptune 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.

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