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 5°06' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 22:53 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 75° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:42.

The Moon will be at mag -12.0; and Saturn will be at mag -0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h15m50s 14°40'N Cancer -12.0 31'41"7
Saturn 08h21m10s 19°36'N Cancer -0.0 18"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 91° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2025

The sky on 8 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Gibbous

96%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 12:34 19:01
Venus 04:08 10:56 17:45
Moon 19:19 01:16 07:22
Mars 09:14 14:55 20:37
Jupiter 01:55 09:01 16:08
Saturn 19:46 01:42 07:37
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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