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°22' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.3, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h47m30s 21°03'N Gemini -8.3 33'13"4
Saturn 06h47m30s 22°25'N Gemini 0.0 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Sep 2025

The sky on 30 September 2025
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
18:37
Twilight ends
20:00
Twilight begins
05:20


Waxing Gibbous

59%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 13:28 19:09
Venus 04:50 11:14 17:37
Moon 14:58 19:43 00:32
Mars 08:58 14:24 19:50
Jupiter 00:43 07:49 14:54
Saturn 18:15 00:09 06:03
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

27 Feb 1974  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
31 Oct 1974  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
06 Jan 1975  –  Saturn at opposition
14 Mar 1975  –  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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