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 8°08' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:25 (PDT), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 6 minutes after the Sun at 22:54.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h38m10s 9°41'S Virgo -11.3 30'01"8
Saturn 12h38m10s 1°32'S Virgo 0.8 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Jul 2026

The sky on 31 July 2026
Sunrise
06:00
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:29
Twilight begins
04:23


Waning Gibbous

92%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:35 11:35 18:35
Venus 09:40 15:49 21:59
Moon 20:49 02:17 07:52
Mars 02:31 09:42 16:53
Jupiter 05:53 12:50 19:47
Saturn 23:00 05:12 11:24
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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