How far is Saturn from Earth right now?
Distance over the next three years
Distance between the centers of Earth and Saturn. Hover or tap the chart to read any date.
Why the distance changes
Over each year, Saturn's distance swings by about the width of Earth's orbit, some 300 million km, because Earth circles the Sun every year while Saturn barely moves along its 29-year orbit. Saturn is closest about once a year, when Earth passes between it and the Sun.
Between 2000 and 2050, Saturn is closest on December 24, 2032, at 1.20 billion km (746.6 million miles), and farthest on December 21, 2017, at 1.65 billion km (1.03 billion miles).
The light you see from Saturn left it more than an hour ago. Radio commands to the Cassini spacecraft took well over an hour to arrive.
How this is calculated
Your browser calculates the position of Saturn for the current moment from your device's clock, using the Astronomy Engine library, which is based on the VSOP87 planetary theory. We checked its Earth distances against NASA JPL data (via Astropy) for dates from 1950 to 2045: they agree to better than 0.02%. Distances are measured center to center.