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 5°09' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 24 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:24 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 62° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:46.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair 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.

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 10h08m50s 7°32'N Leo -11.5 30'40"9
Saturn 10h08m50s 12°42'N Leo 0.4 17"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 72° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Sep 2025

The sky on 6 September 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:36
Twilight begins
05:00


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 12:28 18:59
Venus 04:04 10:54 17:45
Moon 18:50 00:27 06:14
Mars 09:16 14:58 20:41
Jupiter 02:01 09:08 16:15
Saturn 19:54 01:50 07:46
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

10 Apr 1977  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
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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