Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 1°37' of each other. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible between 17:16 and 04:30. They will become accessible at around 17:16, when they rise to an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 22:53, 57° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 04:30 when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Saturn will be at mag -0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 01h55m00s 7°06'N Pisces -12.8 33'27"3
Saturn 01h53m00s 8°39'N Pisces -0.0 19"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 167° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:25
Twilight ends
21:02
Twilight begins
04:39


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:35
Venus 08:20 14:21 20:23
Moon 04:34 11:56 19:05
Mars 00:26 07:58 15:30
Jupiter 23:52 07:19 14:47
Saturn 19:45 01:22 06:58
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

23 Oct 1998  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Dec 1998  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
29 Aug 1999  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
06 Nov 1999  –  Saturn at opposition

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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