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 18' 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 South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:51 (PDT) – 2 hours and 6 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:18.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7, and Saturn at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h36m50s 4°15'S Aquarius -10.7 30'02"1
Saturn 23h36m50s 4°34'S Aquarius 1.1 16"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 49° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2025

The sky on 7 July 2025
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
04:01


Waxing Gibbous

93%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:41 21:30
Venus 03:00 09:54 16:49
Moon 17:58 22:41 03:21
Mars 10:15 16:40 23:05
Jupiter 05:03 12:14 19:24
Saturn 23:59 05:58 11:57
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.

Related news

10 Nov 2053  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
05 May 2054  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
07 Jul 2054  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
31 Aug 2054  –  Saturn ring plane crossing

Image credit

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

Share