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°56' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 11 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:06 (EDT), 19° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:06, 32° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:05, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4 in the constellation Aquarius, and Saturn at mag 0.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

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 21h49m10s 7°51'S Aquarius -12.4 29'41"6
Saturn 21h49m10s 14°48'S Capricornus 0.4 18"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 142° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
03:30


Waxing Gibbous

96%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:47 11:24 18:01
Venus 03:41 09:52 16:03
Moon 18:18 23:27 04:28
Mars 11:00 18:19 01:38
Jupiter 07:23 14:58 22:33
Saturn 03:33 09:27 15:21
All times shown in EDT.

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

19 Aug 1993  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Oct 1993  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
22 Jun 1994  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
01 Sep 1994  –  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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