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 3°12' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 9 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:07 (EDT), 31° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:58, 46° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:51, when they sink below 11° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h06m50s 1°13'N Pisces -12.5 31'54"4
Saturn 00h06m50s 1°59'S Pisces 0.6 18"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 123° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:46


Waxing Gibbous

96%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:32 18:08
Venus 03:50 10:01 16:12
Moon 18:24 23:36 04:39
Mars 11:12 18:28 01:43
Jupiter 07:36 15:07 22:38
Saturn 03:41 09:36 15:30
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

26 Sep 1996  –  Saturn at opposition
03 Dec 1996  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
01 Aug 1997  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
10 Oct 1997  –  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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