Conjunction of Saturn and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 1°03' to the north of Uranus.

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 become visible at around 19:15 (PDT), 23° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 34 minutes after the Sun at 21:50.

Saturn will be at mag 0.3, and Uranus at mag 5.7, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and Uranus 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
Saturn 17h51m00s 22°34'S Sagittarius 0.3 15"8
Uranus 17h51m00s 23°38'S Sagittarius 5.7 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 62° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jul 2025

The sky on 9 July 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:02


Waxing Gibbous

98%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:38 21:25
Venus 02:59 09:56 16:52
Moon 19:48 00:28 05:13
Mars 10:12 16:36 23:00
Jupiter 04:58 12:08 19:18
Saturn 23:51 05:50 11:49
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

05 Sep 1988  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
09 Apr 1989  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
24 Jun 1989  –  Uranus at opposition
09 Sep 1989  –  Uranus 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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