Conjunction of Saturn and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 30' to the south of Neptune.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 21° above the horizon at dusk.

Saturn will be at mag 0.4, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Neptune 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 18h45m10s 22°39'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"6
Neptune 18h45m10s 22°09'S Sagittarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 49° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2025

The sky on 2 July 2025
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Gibbous

53%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:43 21:40
Venus 03:01 09:52 16:42
Moon 13:05 18:54 00:36
Mars 10:20 16:48 23:17
Jupiter 05:18 12:29 19:39
Saturn 00:19 06:17 12:16
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

21 Sep 1989  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
16 Apr 1990  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
05 Jul 1990  –  Neptune at opposition
23 Sep 1990  –  Neptune 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.

Share