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 2°04' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 20 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:35, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:12, 45° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:18, 42° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h12m40s 8°36'S Virgo -12.1 30'55"8
Saturn 14h12m50s 10°40'S Virgo 0.3 17"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 100° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Aug 2025

The sky on 24 August 2025
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:48


Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:56 11:46 18:37
Venus 03:41 10:41 17:42
Moon 07:43 14:03 20:15
Mars 09:27 15:19 21:10
Jupiter 02:41 09:49 16:57
Saturn 20:48 02:44 08:41
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

18 Jun 1982  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
12 Feb 1983  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Apr 1983  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Jul 1983  –  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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