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

Conjunction of Mars 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

Mars and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 4°37' to the south of Mercury.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 13° from it.

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

Mars will be at mag 1.2, and Mercury at mag 2.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 Mars 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
Mars 20h40m20s 19°24'S Capricornus 1.2 3"9
Mercury 20h40m20s 14°47'S Capricornus 2.3 10"0

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

The sky on 20 Aug 2025

The sky on 20 August 2025
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:32
Twilight ends
21:02
Twilight begins
04:44

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:48 11:40 18:32
Venus 03:34 10:37 17:40
Moon 03:23 10:52 18:13
Mars 09:30 15:25 21:20
Jupiter 02:53 10:01 17:10
Saturn 21:04 03:01 08:58
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

09 Feb 2040  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
27 Dec 2041  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
04 Feb 2042  –  Mars at perigee
06 Feb 2042  –  Mars at opposition

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