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 6°17' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:58, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:12, 51° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:42, 38° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Saturn will be at mag 0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h41m50s 8°27'N Pisces -12.5 31'23"8
Saturn 00h53m10s 2°49'N Pisces 0.3 19"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 144° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Aug 2026

The sky on 30 August 2026
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
21:07
Twilight begins
04:36


Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 13:05 19:41
Venus 10:10 15:32 20:54
Moon 20:08 02:20 08:44
Mars 01:38 09:11 16:43
Jupiter 04:13 11:20 18:27
Saturn 20:59 03:12 09:25
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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