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 3°33' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From Fairfield , the trio will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:42, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:35, 46° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:19, 40° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.6; Saturn will be at mag 0.6; and Neptune will be at mag 7.8. 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 00h00m00s 1°13'N Pisces -12.6 32'11"4
Saturn 00h06m50s 1°53'S Pisces 0.6 18"9
Neptune 00h07m20s 0°40'S Pisces 7.8 2"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 139° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Aug 2025

The sky on 12 August 2025
Sunrise
05:56
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
04:10

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

83%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:46 11:50 18:53
Venus 03:03 10:29 17:54
Moon 21:19 03:19 09:31
Mars 09:39 15:39 21:39
Jupiter 02:58 10:27 17:56
Saturn 21:39 03:35 09:32
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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41.14°N
73.26°W
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