Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 1°51' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:23 (PDT), 41° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:28, 51° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:19, when they sink below 11° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h42m50s 6°27'S Aquarius -12.2 29'30"6
Saturn 23h39m30s 4°47'S Aquarius 0.8 18"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 113° from the Sun, which is in Libra 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.

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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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