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 1°43' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:34, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:29, 72° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:21, 47° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Saturn will be at mag 0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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.

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 09h23m00s 14°29'N Leo -12.6 32'42"0
Saturn 09h24m30s 16°10'N Leo 0.0 19"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 127° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2025

The sky on 16 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:52


Waning Gibbous

64%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 14:14 21:29
Venus 03:09 09:46 16:23
Moon 23:48 05:09 10:37
Mars 10:39 17:17 23:55
Jupiter 06:05 13:16 20:26
Saturn 01:20 07:18 13:17
All times shown in PDT.

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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