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 2°55' of each other. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible between 17:36 and 06:10. They will become accessible at around 17:36, when they rise to an altitude of 8° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:53, 78° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:10 when they sink below 8° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Saturn will be at mag -0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 06h21m30s 19°32'N Gemini -12.6 30'03"9
Saturn 06h21m20s 22°27'N Gemini -0.5 20"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 175° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2026

The sky on 10 May 2026
Sunrise
05:52
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:18
Twilight begins
04:16


Waning Crescent

35%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:42 12:29 19:16
Venus 07:37 14:52 22:06
Moon 02:13 07:40 13:14
Mars 04:40 11:06 17:31
Jupiter 09:56 17:03 00:11
Saturn 04:09 10:17 16:25
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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