Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 14.2 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Hackensack , the pair will become visible at around 17:02 (EDT), 32° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 21:33.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 21h36m00s 15°55'S Capricornus -11.3 29'55"0
Saturn 21h35m30s 15°42'S Capricornus 0.6 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 67° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus 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

19%

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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