Conjunction of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°43' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 11° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:24 (EDT), 11° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 30 minutes after the Sun at 21:22.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6, and Saturn at mag 0.8, 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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 12h36m10s 1°14'N Virgo -9.6 30'13"8
Saturn 12h36m10s 1°28'S Virgo 0.8 15"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 May 2024

The sky on 13 May 2024
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
05:00


Waxing Crescent

38%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 11:44 18:05
Venus 06:16 12:58 19:40
Moon 11:18 18:36 01:46
Mars 04:27 10:36 16:45
Jupiter 06:48 13:37 20:25
Saturn 03:28 09:15 15:02
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.

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08 Apr 1982  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Jun 1982  –  Saturn ends 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.

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