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 27' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From Hackensack , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:08 (EDT) – 2 hours and 54 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:28.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 17h40m20s 22°35'S Ophiuchus -10.8 32'48"3
Saturn 17h40m20s 22°07'S Ophiuchus 0.4 15"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:26
Twilight begins
04:20


Waning Crescent

20%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 11:15 17:18
Venus 04:25 10:31 16:37
Moon 03:57 09:16 14:45
Mars 11:41 19:06 02:30
Jupiter 08:33 16:02 23:31
Saturn 04:47 10:39 16:31
All times shown in EDT.

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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