Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°03' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 10° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in Pisces; and Saturn will be at mag 0.7 in Cetus.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 00h31m20s 6°29'N Pisces -10.5 32'13"5
Saturn 00h40m40s 1°59'N Cetus 0.7 16"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 13 May 2026

The sky on 13 May 2026
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
20:37
Twilight ends
22:27
Twilight begins
04:26


Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:15 13:21 20:28
Venus 08:01 15:35 23:09
Moon 04:10 10:31 17:04
Mars 05:08 11:42 18:16
Jupiter 10:10 17:34 00:57
Saturn 04:37 10:47 16:56
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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