Conjunction of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°47' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 12 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:46 (EST), 30° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:04, 50° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:09, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5 in the constellation Pisces, and Saturn at mag 0.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

The pair 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.

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

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 00h33m10s 7°30'N Pisces -12.5 31'38"9
Saturn 00h33m10s 0°43'N Cetus 0.5 18"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 132° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Nov 2026

The sky on 20 November 2026
Sunrise
07:20
Sunset
17:11
Twilight ends
18:46
Twilight begins
05:45


Waxing Gibbous

87%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:39 11:00 16:22
Venus 04:27 09:59 15:31
Moon 14:38 21:05 03:45
Mars 23:43 06:35 13:27
Jupiter 23:37 06:27 13:17
Saturn 14:59 21:04 03:10
All times shown in EST.

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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09 Aug 2027  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
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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