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 2°06' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 22 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 00:25 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 58° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:22.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7 in the constellation Cetus, and Saturn at mag 0.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 02h12m50s 8°37'N Cetus -11.7 30'04"3
Saturn 02h12m50s 10°44'N Aries 0.2 17"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2026

The sky on 28 March 2026
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
19:09
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:18


Waxing Gibbous

82%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 11:18 16:58
Venus 07:39 14:09 20:39
Moon 15:05 22:03 04:51
Mars 06:03 11:53 17:42
Jupiter 12:22 19:32 02:41
Saturn 06:45 12:48 18:50
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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