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 5°18' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 17 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 18:45, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:51, 74° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:42, 24° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Saturn at mag -0.4, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h07m30s 24°01'N Taurus -12.7 32'18"5
Saturn 04h07m30s 18°42'N Taurus -0.4 20"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 158° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Aug 2026

The sky on 14 August 2026
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:38

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

10%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:07 12:04 19:01
Venus 09:52 15:44 21:35
Moon 08:21 14:39 20:48
Mars 02:15 09:28 16:40
Jupiter 05:13 12:08 19:02
Saturn 22:05 04:16 10:27
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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03 Oct 2178  –  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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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