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°03' 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 03:03 (PDT) – 3 hours and 49 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 40° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:22.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 09h54m10s 8°34'N Leo -10.7 30'50"5
Saturn 10h00m00s 13°25'N Leo 0.5 16"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Sep 2025

The sky on 4 September 2025
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:39
Twilight begins
04:58


Waxing Gibbous

91%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 12:21 18:56
Venus 04:00 10:52 17:45
Moon 17:45 22:48 03:57
Mars 09:17 15:01 20:45
Jupiter 02:07 09:14 16:21
Saturn 20:03 01:58 07:54
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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11 Dec 1977  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 Feb 1978  –  Saturn at opposition
25 Apr 1978  –  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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