The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°58' 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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:21, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:17, 46° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:58, 23° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Virgo.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 145° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 17 May 2024

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.

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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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