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 8°02' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:59, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:45, 43° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:58, 26° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Saturn at mag 0.4, 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 13h04m40s 12°04'S Virgo -12.6 32'53"2
Saturn 13h04m40s 4°01'S Virgo 0.4 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 132° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2024

The sky on 29 November 2024
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:12
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:09


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:01 12:29 16:58
Venus 10:12 14:39 19:06
Moon 05:25 10:10 14:48
Mars 20:16 03:43 11:10
Jupiter 16:43 00:13 07:44
Saturn 12:35 18:05 23:36
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

26 Jan 2011  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
03 Apr 2011  –  Saturn at opposition
13 Jun 2011  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
07 Feb 2012  –  Saturn enters 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.

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