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 38' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 5 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 become visible at around 17:17 (PDT), 27° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 20:23.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8, and Saturn at mag 0.4, 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 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 19h33m30s 22°26'S Sagittarius -10.8 29'39"2
Saturn 19h33m30s 21°47'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 51° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jun 2025

The sky on 9 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 13:44 21:01
Venus 03:15 09:46 16:17
Moon 19:08 23:56 04:41
Mars 10:47 17:30 00:12
Jupiter 06:25 13:36 20:47
Saturn 01:46 07:45 13:43
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

22 Sep 1990  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
16 May 1991  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
26 Jul 1991  –  Saturn at opposition
04 Oct 1991  –  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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