The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°38' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 12 days old.
The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Aquarius.
The pair 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.
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 coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 146° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.
The sky on 26 Sep 2023
|The sky on 26 September 2023|
11 days old
All times shown in PDT.
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.
|27 Aug 2023||– Saturn at opposition|
|07 Sep 2024||– Saturn at opposition|
|23 Mar 2025||– Saturn ring plane crossing|
|05 May 2025||– Equinox on Saturn|
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.