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 1°38' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:11, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:08, 52° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:55, 25° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 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 23h56m50s 4°38'S Pisces -12.5 29'24"0
Saturn 23h56m50s 3°00'S Pisces 0.6 19"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 161° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Sep 2025

The sky on 22 September 2025
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
18:48
Twilight ends
20:12
Twilight begins
05:13


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 13:12 19:09
Venus 04:34 11:08 17:41
Moon 07:29 13:22 19:06
Mars 09:04 14:35 20:07
Jupiter 01:10 08:16 15:21
Saturn 18:48 00:43 06:37
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

11 Jul 1966  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
19 Sep 1966  –  Saturn at opposition
28 Oct 1966  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
26 Nov 1966  –  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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