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 1°11' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 10 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:35 (EST), 52° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:41, 64° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:47, when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Leo.

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 09h25m20s 17°45'N Leo -12.4 30'02"7
Saturn 09h25m20s 16°33'N Leo 0.0 19"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 130° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Crescent

42%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:33 12:55 17:17
Venus 10:09 14:32 18:54
Moon 23:09 06:06 12:50
Mars 20:36 04:03 11:30
Jupiter 17:09 00:40 08:11
Saturn 12:58 18:29 23:59
All times shown in EST.

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

10 Feb 2007  –  Saturn at opposition
19 Apr 2007  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
19 Dec 2007  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
24 Feb 2008  –  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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