Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 1°41' of each other. The Moon will be 12 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:59 (PDT), 20° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 23:04, 35° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:10, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Saturn will be at mag 0.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 20h14m10s 18°39'S Capricornus -12.5 29'36"4
Saturn 20h16m20s 20°16'S Capricornus 0.1 18"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 152° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jul 2025

The sky on 13 July 2025
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:06


Waning Gibbous

90%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:29 21:12
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:57
Moon 21:50 03:06 08:30
Mars 10:08 16:29 22:50
Jupiter 04:46 11:56 19:06
Saturn 23:36 05:35 11:33
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

26 Jul 1991  –  Saturn at opposition
04 Oct 1991  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
28 May 1992  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
07 Aug 1992  –  Saturn at opposition

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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