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 Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°33' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:03 (PDT) – 2 hours and 19 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:54.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.6; Saturn will be at mag 0.3; and Mars will be at mag 1.8. The trio will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h10m40s 19°40'N Cancer -9.6 29'26"5
Saturn 09h08m10s 17°11'N Cancer 0.3 16"6
Mars 09h04m20s 17°53'N Cancer 1.8 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jun 2026

The sky on 13 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
03:52

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:24 14:36 21:48
Venus 08:26 15:33 22:40
Moon 03:57 11:23 18:56
Mars 03:39 10:29 17:20
Jupiter 08:12 15:16 22:20
Saturn 02:04 08:15 14:26
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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