Conjunction of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 8°13' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 15 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:06 (PDT), 21° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:03, 49° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:53, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 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
The Moon 13h31m20s 14°48'S Virgo -12.5 29'56"8
Saturn 13h31m20s 6°34'S Virgo 0.3 19"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 167° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Sep 2025

The sky on 9 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 12:38 19:02
Venus 04:10 10:57 17:45
Moon 19:48 02:05 08:32
Mars 09:13 14:54 20:34
Jupiter 01:52 08:58 16:05
Saturn 19:42 01:37 07:33
All times shown in PDT.

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

13 Apr 1953  –  Saturn at opposition
23 Jun 1953  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
16 Feb 1954  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
26 Apr 1954  –  Saturn 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.

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