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 6°51' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:04 (PDT) – 3 hours and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 32° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:15.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Saturn at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h09m20s 5°50'S Aquarius -11.6 29'36"7
Saturn 22h09m20s 12°42'S Aquarius 0.7 16"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 81° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jul 2025

The sky on 15 July 2025
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:44
Twilight begins
04:07


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:41 14:22 21:04
Venus 03:00 10:00 17:00
Moon 22:49 04:40 10:41
Mars 10:06 16:26 22:45
Jupiter 04:40 11:50 19:00
Saturn 23:28 05:27 11:25
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

15 Oct 1992  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
09 Jun 1993  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 1993  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Oct 1993  –  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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