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

Conjunction of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°38' 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 San Diego , the pair will be visible from soon after it rises, at 17:12, until soon before it sets at 04:11.

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 -12.7, and Saturn at mag 0.4, 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 22h16m10s 15°18'S Aquarius -12.7 33'06"6
Saturn 22h16m10s 12°39'S Aquarius 0.4 18"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 146° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Sep 2023

The sky on 26 September 2023
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
18:40
Twilight ends
20:02
Twilight begins
05:14

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

94%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:18 11:39 17:59
Venus 03:21 09:53 16:26
Moon 17:20 22:51 04:30
Mars 07:55 13:39 19:23
Jupiter 20:36 03:18 10:00
Saturn 17:12 22:41 04:11
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

27 Aug 2023  –  Saturn at opposition
07 Sep 2024  –  Saturn at opposition
23 Mar 2025  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
05 May 2025  –  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.

Share

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme