Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°28' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:57 (EST) – 2 hours and 29 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:42.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h56m30s 0°03'N Pisces -11.3 32'27"2
Saturn 00h01m10s 2°07'S Pisces 0.9 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 62° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 May 2025

The sky on 22 May 2025
Sunrise
05:26
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
22:09
Twilight begins
03:28


Waning Crescent

21%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:04 12:12 19:20
Venus 03:32 09:52 16:12
Moon 02:43 08:41 14:51
Mars 10:57 18:05 01:12
Jupiter 06:59 14:31 22:02
Saturn 02:57 08:52 14:48
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.

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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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