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 6°57' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Saturn at mag 0.7, 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 13h10m20s 11°59'S Virgo -8.6 33'22"6
Saturn 13h10m20s 5°02'S Virgo 0.7 15"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Virgo 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.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

13 Jun 2011  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
07 Feb 2012  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 Apr 2012  –  Saturn at opposition
25 Jun 2012  –  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.

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