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 3°00' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 12 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:36 (EDT), 45° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:07, 60° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:46, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h42m20s 7°23'N Leo -12.4 29'38"2
Saturn 10h42m20s 10°23'N Leo 0.3 19"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 140° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 11 May 2025

The sky on 11 May 2025
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
20:36
Twilight ends
22:25
Twilight begins
04:29


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:14 18:50
Venus 04:28 10:39 16:50
Moon 19:03 00:16 05:22
Mars 11:53 19:05 02:16
Jupiter 08:16 15:43 23:10
Saturn 04:16 10:11 16:06
All times shown in EDT.

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

01 Mar 1979  –  Saturn at opposition
09 May 1979  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
26 Oct 1979  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
06 Jan 1980  –  Saturn enters 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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