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 4°18' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 18:17 (PDT), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 44 minutes after the Sun at 19:25.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4 in the constellation Pisces, and Saturn at mag 1.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair 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.

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 23h42m20s 0°12'N Pisces -9.4 32'15"1
Saturn 23h42m20s 4°06'S Aquarius 1.1 15"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jul 2025

The sky on 12 July 2025
Sunrise
05:47
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:05


Waning Gibbous

95%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:31 21:15
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:56
Moon 21:15 02:16 07:23
Mars 10:09 16:31 22:53
Jupiter 04:49 11:59 19:09
Saturn 23:40 05:38 11:37
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

11 Feb 1996  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
18 Jul 1996  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
26 Sep 1996  –  Saturn at opposition
03 Dec 1996  –  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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