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 1°50' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 4° below the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.1 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 23h39m50s 2°25'S Pisces -8.1 33'05"6
Saturn 23h39m50s 4°16'S Aquarius 1.1 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2025

The sky on 28 March 2025
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
04:55


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:05 12:17 18:30
Venus 05:34 12:02 18:30
Moon 06:11 12:07 18:16
Mars 12:14 19:55 03:36
Jupiter 09:42 17:13 00:45
Saturn 06:11 11:59 17:46
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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.

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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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