The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°56' of each other. The Moon will be 13 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:16 (PDT), 36° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:05, 74° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:07, when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Saturn will be at mag -0.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 08h51m00s 12°30'N Cancer -12.6 31'07"1
Saturn 08h57m10s 18°15'N Cancer -0.1 20"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 148° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Sep 2025

The sky on 4 September 2025
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:39
Twilight begins
04:58

12-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

90%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 12:21 18:56
Venus 04:00 10:52 17:45
Moon 17:45 22:48 03:57
Mars 09:17 15:01 20:45
Jupiter 02:07 09:14 16:21
Saturn 20:03 01:58 07:54
All times shown in PDT.

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

02 Feb 1977  –  Saturn at opposition
10 Apr 1977  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
11 Dec 1977  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 Feb 1978  –  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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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