The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 8°04' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 24 days old.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:38, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:21, 43° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:32, 43° above your southern horizon.
The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Virgo.
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 | 13h04m00s | 12°17'S | Virgo | -11.7 | 32'03"8 |
| Saturn | 13h04m00s | 4°13'S | Virgo | 0.6 | 17"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.
The sky on 16 Jul 2024
| The sky on 16 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
80% 11 days old |
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
| 30 May 2010 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 26 Jan 2011 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 03 Apr 2011 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 13 Jun 2011 | – 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.