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 5°59' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 10 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:00 (PDT), 65° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:37, 67° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:16, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4 in the constellation Sextans, and Saturn at mag 0.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Leo.

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 10h28m50s 5°35'N Sextans -12.4 32'32"0
Saturn 10h28m50s 11°34'N Leo 0.4 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 116° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Aug 2026

The sky on 28 August 2026
Sunrise
06:20
Sunset
19:23
Twilight ends
20:50
Twilight begins
04:52


Waning Gibbous

98%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:25 12:58 19:30
Venus 09:59 15:33 21:07
Moon 19:19 00:57 06:44
Mars 02:01 09:12 16:23
Jupiter 04:33 11:25 18:17
Saturn 21:08 03:19 09:29
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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