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 51.9 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 15 days old.

From Sugar Land , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:43, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:56, 38° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:53, 12° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Saturn will be at mag 0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h53m30s 21°26'S Sagittarius -12.8 33'14"4
Saturn 18h54m10s 22°17'S Sagittarius 0.0 18"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 172° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Apr 2025

The sky on 5 April 2025
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:04
Twilight begins
05:43


Waxing Gibbous

64%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:12 12:12 18:12
Venus 05:46 11:58 18:10
Moon 13:12 20:28 03:37
Mars 13:12 20:13 03:13
Jupiter 10:28 17:25 00:22
Saturn 06:15 12:09 18:02
All times shown in CDT.

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.

Related news

24 Apr 2048  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
03 Jul 2048  –  Saturn at opposition
12 Sep 2048  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
06 May 2049  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share