The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 46' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 26 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 dawn sky, rising at 04:25 (PDT) – 2 hours and 16 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.
The Moon will be at mag -10.9, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Capricornus.
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 | 21h01m30s | 16°47'S | Capricornus | -10.9 | 32'42"2 |
| Saturn | 21h01m30s | 17°33'S | Capricornus | 0.6 | 15"7 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 50° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.
The sky on 16 Jul 2026
| The sky on 16 July 2026 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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11% 3 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.