The Moon, Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 4°52' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.
From Cambridge , the trio will become visible at around 20:40 (EDT), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 55 minutes after the Sun at 23:02.
The Moon will be at mag -10.1; Saturn will be at mag -0.0; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Gemini.
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 trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 06h48m20s | 27°31'N | Gemini | -10.1 | 29'26"8 |
| Saturn | 06h47m30s | 22°38'N | Gemini | -0.0 | 16"9 |
| Mars | 06h42m10s | 24°19'N | Gemini | 1.7 | 4"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 2 Oct 2024
| The sky on 2 October 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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0% 29 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 07 Mar 2004 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 08 Nov 2004 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 13 Jan 2005 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 21 Mar 2005 | – 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.