The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°04' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 15 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 between 19:57 and 05:22. They will become accessible at around 19:57, when they rise to an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:40, 47° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:22 when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.
The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Aquarius.
The pair 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.
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 | 23h04m20s | 11°21'S | Aquarius | -12.5 | 29'46"4 |
| Saturn | 23h04m20s | 8°16'S | Aquarius | 0.5 | 19"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 172° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
The sky on 24 Dec 2025
| The sky on 24 December 2025 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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22% 4 days old |
All times shown in PST.
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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.
Related news
| 06 Sep 1965 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 13 Nov 1965 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 02 Apr 1966 | – Saturn ring plane crossing |
| 15 Jun 1966 | – Equinox on Saturn |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.