Equinox on Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed


Objects: Saturn

The changing seasons on Saturn will pass an equinox, meaning that the Sun will appear to pass over the planet's equator.

This means that Saturn's rings will appear very close to edge-on as viewed from the Earth. Our line of sight to Saturn is very closely aligned with the line between the Sun and Saturn, because Saturn's distance from the Sun and Earth is more than nine times greater than the distance between the Earth and Sun. So, when the Sun shines down on Saturn's equator, this is also the direction from which we view the planet.

Saturn's rings are closely aligned with its equator, and are no more than a kilometer thick, despite stretching for tens of thousands of kilometers around the planet. When they are viewed edge-on, they can become so thin as to be incredibly hard to see.

This configuration arises twice within each orbit that Saturn makes around the Sun, just as the Earth has two equinoxes each year. However, as Saturn takes nearly 30 years to orbit the Sun, its equinoxes only occur once every 15 years.

The position of Saturn at the moment of its equinox will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
Saturn 23h55m50s 2°38'S Pisces 16.2"
Sun 02h52m 16°30'N Aries 31'42"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 6 May 2025

The sky on 6 May 2025
Sunrise
05:30
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:42
Twilight begins
03:38


Waxing Gibbous

71%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:48 11:16 17:43
Venus 03:48 09:57 16:06
Moon 14:09 20:48 03:14
Mars 11:05 18:27 01:49
Jupiter 07:36 15:10 22:45
Saturn 03:48 09:41 15:35
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

06 May 2025  –  Equinox on Saturn
13 Jul 2025  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Sep 2025  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Nov 2025  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

Image credit

© Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona), NASA/ESA

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