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 a mere 40.5 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:21 (PDT), 60° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:29.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9; and Saturn will be at mag 0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 09h55m50s 14°57'N Leo -11.9 32'13"2
Saturn 09h55m10s 14°18'N Leo 0.3 17"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 85° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jun 2025

The sky on 2 June 2025
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
03:56


Waxing Crescent

49%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:54 13:07 20:20
Venus 03:22 09:47 16:12
Moon 12:24 18:58 01:23
Mars 10:56 17:43 00:29
Jupiter 06:46 13:57 21:07
Saturn 02:13 08:11 14:08
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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