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 4'25" to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 17 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:47, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:40, 51° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:39, 32° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Saturn at mag 0.7, 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 23h44m10s 4°20'S Aquarius -12.4 29'32"9
Saturn 23h44m10s 4°15'S Aquarius 0.7 19"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 152° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2025

The sky on 17 July 2025
Sunrise
05:50
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
04:09


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:35 14:15 20:55
Venus 03:00 10:02 17:03
Moon 23:44 06:14 12:54
Mars 10:04 16:22 22:40
Jupiter 04:34 11:44 18:54
Saturn 23:20 05:19 11:17
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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09 Oct 2054  –  Equinox on Saturn

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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