The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 53' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 20 days old.
At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:05 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 50° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:53.
The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Pisces.
The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 | 00h51m20s | 3°41'N | Pisces | -12.1 | 29'36"0 |
| Saturn | 00h51m20s | 2°48'N | Pisces | 0.5 | 18"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 Cancer at this time of year.
The sky on 16 Aug 2024
| The sky on 16 August 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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87% 12 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 25 Jul 1967 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 02 Oct 1967 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 09 Dec 1967 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 06 Aug 1968 | – 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.