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

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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°55' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:56, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:06, 49° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:02, 12° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7 in the constellation Pisces, and Saturn at mag 0.3 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

The pair 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.

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 00h46m20s 8°58'N Pisces -12.7 31'43"2
Saturn 00h46m20s 2°02'N Cetus 0.3 19"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 169° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Sep 2026

The sky on 27 September 2026
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
18:32
Twilight ends
20:06
Twilight begins
05:00

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

97%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:30 13:51 19:13
Venus 09:45 14:29 19:13
Moon 18:24 00:51 07:32
Mars 00:59 08:26 15:52
Jupiter 02:40 09:43 16:47
Saturn 18:56 01:06 07:17
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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09 Aug 2027  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion

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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42.38°N
71.11°W
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