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 55' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 12 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 20:09 (PDT), 51° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:43, 57° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:54, when they sink below 11° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Virgo.

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

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 12h08m00s 0°59'N Virgo -12.5 31'43"1
Saturn 12h08m00s 1°54'N Virgo 0.6 18"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 132° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jul 2026

The sky on 9 July 2026
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:02


Waning Crescent

22%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 13:14 20:05
Venus 09:11 15:49 22:28
Moon 01:06 08:08 15:19
Mars 02:59 10:04 17:08
Jupiter 06:56 13:57 20:57
Saturn 00:26 06:37 12:49
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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29 Jan 2129  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
07 Apr 2129  –  Saturn at opposition

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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