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°59' to the south 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 11° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:25 (PDT), 11° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 31 minutes after the Sun at 20:25.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h46m40s 13°34'S Virgo -10.1 32'38"4
Saturn 13h46m40s 8°35'S Virgo 0.6 15"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2025

The sky on 3 July 2025
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:58


Waxing Gibbous

65%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:48 14:43 21:38
Venus 03:00 09:52 16:44
Moon 14:02 19:35 01:01
Mars 10:19 16:47 23:14
Jupiter 05:15 12:26 19:36
Saturn 00:15 06:14 12:12
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

25 Jun 2012  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
18 Feb 2013  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
28 Apr 2013  –  Saturn at opposition
07 Jul 2013  –  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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