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 34' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 7 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 17:29 (PDT), 36° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 17:30, 36° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 21:35, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 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 20h33m40s 18°57'S Capricornus -11.8 31'27"3
Saturn 20h33m40s 19°32'S Capricornus 0.4 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 83° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jun 2025

The sky on 8 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

95%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:21 13:39 20:56
Venus 03:16 09:46 16:16
Moon 18:08 23:07 04:01
Mars 10:49 17:32 00:15
Jupiter 06:28 13:39 20:50
Saturn 01:50 07:48 13:46
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

09 Oct 1962  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
03 Jun 1963  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
12 Aug 1963  –  Saturn at opposition
21 Oct 1963  –  Saturn 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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