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 7'22" to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 25 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 dawn sky, rising at 03:14 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 43° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:07.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 10h07m50s 12°55'N Leo -11.0 32'36"3
Saturn 10h07m50s 12°48'N Leo 0.5 17"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Apr 2025

The sky on 5 April 2025
Sunrise
07:07
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:34
Twilight begins
05:33


Waxing Gibbous

62%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:22 12:22 18:21
Venus 05:51 12:08 18:24
Moon 12:47 20:35 04:14
Mars 12:53 20:22 03:52
Jupiter 10:10 17:35 00:59
Saturn 06:28 12:18 18:08
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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