Close approach of the Moon, Saturn and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Saturn and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 5°00' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:20 (PDT) – 1 hour and 58 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:48.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3 in Capricornus; Saturn will be at mag 0.5 in Sagittarius; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9 in Sagittarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 20h08m20s 25°22'S Capricornus -10.3 30'26"6
Saturn 20h04m00s 20°27'S Sagittarius 0.5 15"4
Uranus 20h03m40s 20°54'S Sagittarius 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Apr 2026

The sky on 30 April 2026
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:34
Twilight ends
21:07
Twilight begins
04:29


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:29 11:53 18:18
Venus 07:31 14:39 21:47
Moon 19:04 00:22 05:36
Mars 04:59 11:17 17:34
Jupiter 10:28 17:36 00:45
Saturn 04:46 10:53 16:59
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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