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 6°00' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 1° below the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7 in the constellation Pisces, and Saturn at mag 1.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 23h18m20s 0°25'S Pisces -8.7 30'46"6
Saturn 23h18m20s 6°25'S Aquarius 1.1 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Oct 2024

The sky on 3 October 2024
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
18:30
Twilight ends
20:02
Twilight begins
05:17


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 12:49 18:38
Venus 09:35 14:40 19:46
Moon 07:34 13:15 18:47
Mars 23:40 07:11 14:42
Jupiter 21:55 05:23 12:51
Saturn 17:30 23:03 04:37
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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11 Aug 1995  –  Saturn ring plane crossing

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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