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 34' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 25 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 02:52 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 30° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:36.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h48m40s 13°17'S Libra -11.0 31'15"5
Saturn 14h48m40s 13°52'S Libra 0.4 16"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jun 2024

The sky on 4 June 2024
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:28
Twilight begins
02:55


Waning Crescent

4%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:31 11:51 19:12
Venus 05:09 12:41 20:13
Moon 03:24 10:53 18:37
Mars 02:53 09:29 16:06
Jupiter 04:29 11:50 19:10
Saturn 01:31 07:11 12:51
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

01 Jul 1983  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
24 Feb 1984  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
03 May 1984  –  Saturn at opposition
13 Jul 1984  –  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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