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 6°53' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:24 (PST) – 3 hours and 29 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:25.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9; and Saturn will be at mag -0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

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 04h03m10s 25°47'N Taurus -10.9 31'40"6
Saturn 04h07m50s 18°59'N Taurus -0.0 17"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 51° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Dec 2025

The sky on 13 December 2025
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
16:43
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:17


Waning Crescent

26%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 10:22 15:31
Venus 06:22 11:20 16:18
Moon 01:08 06:59 12:42
Mars 07:22 12:14 17:07
Jupiter 18:57 02:02 09:08
Saturn 12:13 18:05 23:57
All times shown in PST.

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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31 Jan 1972  –  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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