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 7°03' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.4 in the constellation Pisces, and Saturn at mag 1.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair 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.

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 23h47m10s 3°31'N Pisces -8.4 31'13"4
Saturn 23h47m10s 3°31'S Aquarius 1.1 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 3 May 2026

The sky on 3 May 2026
Sunrise
05:58
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:10
Twilight begins
04:25


Waning Gibbous

92%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:31 12:02 18:33
Venus 07:33 14:43 21:53
Moon 21:04 01:57 06:45
Mars 04:53 11:13 17:33
Jupiter 10:18 17:26 00:34
Saturn 04:35 10:42 16:49
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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.

Related news

27 Mar 2084  –  Equinox on Saturn
14 Jul 2084  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
22 Sep 2084  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Nov 2084  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share