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 43' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 5 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From London however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 10° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair 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.

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 16h49m10s 20°20'S Ophiuchus -11.0 32'14"6
Saturn 16h49m10s 21°04'S Ophiuchus 0.4 15"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:09
Twilight ends
22:28
Twilight begins
03:28


Waning Crescent

22%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 11:19 17:23
Venus 04:28 10:36 16:43
Moon 04:22 09:10 14:13
Mars 11:05 19:10 03:16
Jupiter 07:55 16:07 00:19
Saturn 04:56 10:44 16:32
All times shown in BST.

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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