Conjunction of Saturn and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 52' to the north of Neptune.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 21:19 (PDT), 37° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:44.

Saturn will be at mag 0.5, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 Saturn 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
Saturn 13h23m00s 6°02'S Virgo 0.5 17"2
Neptune 13h23m00s 6°55'S Virgo 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 92° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jun 2025

The sky on 7 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
03:54


Waxing Gibbous

91%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:16 13:34 20:51
Venus 03:17 09:46 16:15
Moon 17:09 22:21 03:28
Mars 10:50 17:34 00:17
Jupiter 06:31 13:42 20:53
Saturn 01:54 07:52 13:50
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.

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14 Apr 1954  –  Neptune at opposition
05 Jul 1954  –  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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