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, Saturn and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Saturn and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 2°58' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Fairfield , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:15 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 33° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:32.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.9; Saturn will be at mag 0.8; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 00h01m40s 1°03'N Pisces -11.9 32'03"8
Saturn 00h07m20s 1°34'S Pisces 0.8 17"3
Neptune 00h08m30s 0°30'S Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Jun 2025

The sky on 18 June 2025
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:08

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:45 14:21 21:57
Venus 02:58 09:48 16:37
Moon 00:42 06:37 12:44
Mars 10:27 17:15 00:02
Jupiter 05:39 13:11 20:43
Saturn 01:15 07:12 13:10
All times shown in EDT.

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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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