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°08' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 7 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:59 (PDT), 65° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:43.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7 in the constellation Cetus, and Saturn at mag 0.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.

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 02h37m40s 9°54'N Cetus -11.7 31'45"6
Saturn 02h37m40s 13°02'N Aries 0.1 17"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jul 2025

The sky on 9 July 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:02


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:38 21:25
Venus 02:59 09:56 16:52
Moon 19:48 00:28 05:13
Mars 10:12 16:36 23:00
Jupiter 04:58 12:08 19:18
Saturn 23:51 05:50 11:49
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 Jan 2000  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
12 Sep 2000  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
19 Nov 2000  –  Saturn at opposition
24 Jan 2001  –  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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