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 a mere 36.3 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 17:07 (EST), 36° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 21:25.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

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 23h04m40s 7°23'S Aquarius -11.3 32'03"0
Saturn 23h05m40s 7°55'S Aquarius 0.9 16"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 60° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jan 2025

The sky on 4 January 2025
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:24
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:30

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

30%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:48 10:22 14:56
Venus 09:42 15:00 20:18
Moon 10:21 15:58 21:47
Mars 17:22 01:01 08:41
Jupiter 14:00 21:29 04:57
Saturn 10:17 15:51 21:25
All times shown in EST.

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.

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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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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