Close approach of the Moon, Pluto, Saturn and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, 134340 Pluto, Saturn and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 1°33' of each other. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From Cambridge , the quartet will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:39, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:34, 44° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:45, 17° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7; 134340 Pluto will be at mag 0.0; Saturn will be at mag 0.6; and Neptune will be at mag 7.8. The quartet 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.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and 134340 Pluto around the time of closest approach is available here.

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h53m50s 0°25'N Pisces -12.7 32'33"3
134340 Pluto 00h00m00s 0°00'N Pisces 0.0 0"0
Saturn 00h00m40s 2°38'S Pisces 0.6 19"3
Neptune 00h05m10s 0°56'S Pisces 7.8 2"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The quartet will be at an angular separation of 167° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2025

The sky on 8 September 2025
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:43
Twilight begins
04:36


Waning Gibbous

97%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:50 12:26 19:02
Venus 03:43 10:48 17:54
Moon 19:08 01:02 07:09
Mars 09:14 14:48 20:22
Jupiter 01:24 08:54 16:25
Saturn 19:41 01:34 07:28
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

13 Jul 2025  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Sep 2025  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Nov 2025  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
26 Jul 2026  –  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.

Share