The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°40' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 19 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 dawn sky, rising at 00:51 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 26° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:47.
The Moon will be at mag -12.2, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.
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 | 20h15m40s | 22°34'S | Capricornus | -12.2 | 30'45"6 |
| Saturn | 20h15m40s | 19°54'S | Capricornus | 0.3 | 17"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 111° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
The sky on 12 May 2020
| The sky on 12 May 2020 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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63% 19 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 10 May 2020 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 20 Jul 2020 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 29 Sep 2020 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 23 May 2021 | – Saturn enters 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.