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°18' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 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 21:01, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:11, 36° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:16, 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h21m30s 24°45'S Scorpius -12.8 33'26"7
Saturn 16h21m30s 19°27'S Scorpius 0.0 18"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 174° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jul 2025

The sky on 12 July 2025
Sunrise
05:47
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:05


Waning Gibbous

94%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:31 21:15
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:56
Moon 21:15 02:16 07:23
Mars 10:09 16:31 22:53
Jupiter 04:49 11:59 19:09
Saturn 23:40 05:38 11:37
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.

Related news

19 Mar 1986  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 May 1986  –  Saturn at opposition
06 Aug 1986  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
30 Mar 1987  –  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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