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°48' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:22 (PDT) – 2 hours and 38 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:32.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1 in Taurus; and Saturn will be at mag -0.0 in Orion.

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 05h59m30s 24°10'N Taurus -10.1 33'02"9
Saturn 05h58m40s 22°22'N Orion -0.0 16"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Sep 2025

The sky on 29 September 2025
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
18:38
Twilight ends
20:01
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Crescent

48%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:43 13:26 19:09
Venus 04:48 11:13 17:38
Moon 14:11 18:50 23:31
Mars 08:59 14:26 19:52
Jupiter 00:47 07:52 14:57
Saturn 18:19 00:13 06:07
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

13 Feb 1973  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
16 Oct 1973  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
22 Dec 1973  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Feb 1974  –  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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