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 2°19' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 8 days old.

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

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:30 (EDT), 27° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:37, 29° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:18, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.2, and Saturn at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Moon 19h48m10s 23°45'S Sagittarius -12.2 30'50"2
Saturn 19h48m10s 21°25'S Sagittarius 0.2 17"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 111° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Sep 2020

The sky on 25 September 2020
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
19:01
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:28

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

73%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:08 14:29 19:50
Venus 03:34 10:25 17:16
Moon 15:59 20:46 01:35
Mars 20:10 02:34 08:58
Jupiter 15:20 20:04 00:48
Saturn 15:47 20:37 01:26
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.

Related news

20 Jul 2020  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Sep 2020  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
23 May 2021  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
02 Aug 2021  –  Saturn at opposition

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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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