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°58' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:23 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 41° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:30.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.9; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h44m40s 8°39'N Pisces -11.9 31'29"5
Saturn 00h55m30s 3°19'N Pisces 0.5 17"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 91° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2026

The sky on 7 July 2026
Sunrise
05:11
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:00

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

45%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:11 13:20 20:30
Venus 08:46 15:41 22:36
Moon 23:42 06:14 12:59
Mars 02:32 09:58 17:24
Jupiter 06:33 13:55 21:18
Saturn 00:23 06:38 12:53
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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Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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