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 21' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 9 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:58 (PDT), 69° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:31, 70° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:19, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.3, and Saturn at mag 0.2, 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 09h53m10s 14°53'N Leo -12.3 32'28"3
Saturn 09h53m10s 14°31'N Leo 0.2 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 110° from the Sun, which is in Aries 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

67%

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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03 Mar 2038  –  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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