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°04' of each other. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:31 (EDT), 14° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 23:17, 50° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:24, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7 in Pisces; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4 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 00h27m40s 6°39'N Pisces -12.7 31'45"9
Saturn 00h38m40s 1°14'N Cetus 0.4 19"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 158° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Oct 2026

The sky on 24 October 2026
Sunrise
07:12
Sunset
17:58
Twilight ends
19:31
Twilight begins
05:39


Waxing Gibbous

98%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:03 13:49 18:35
Venus 07:23 12:23 17:22
Moon 16:53 23:38 06:36
Mars 00:42 07:50 14:59
Jupiter 01:28 08:23 15:18
Saturn 17:10 23:17 05:25
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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17 Oct 2027  –  Saturn at opposition

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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