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 6°11' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 8 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 17:20 (PDT), 38° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 17:37, 38° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 21:49, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9 in the constellation Aquarius, and Saturn at mag 0.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 21h05m50s 11°34'S Aquarius -11.9 31'14"1
Saturn 21h05m50s 17°45'S Capricornus 0.4 16"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 87° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Mar 2026

The sky on 22 March 2026
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
19:04
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:27


Waxing Crescent

21%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:49 11:30 17:11
Venus 07:43 14:05 20:27
Moon 08:54 16:11 23:37
Mars 06:14 11:59 17:43
Jupiter 12:45 19:54 03:04
Saturn 07:07 13:08 19:10
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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