Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°13' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 02:01, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:46, 29° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:39, 28° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 16h13m40s 16°48'S Scorpius -12.2 30'39"2
Saturn 16h12m30s 19°01'S Scorpius 0.2 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 106° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Nov 2024

The sky on 25 November 2024
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
16:26
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Crescent

23%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:30 12:58 17:26
Venus 10:15 14:43 19:11
Moon 01:23 07:34 13:35
Mars 20:42 04:05 11:28
Jupiter 17:13 00:40 08:07
Saturn 12:57 18:29 00:01
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

20 Jul 2014  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
14 Mar 2015  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
22 May 2015  –  Saturn at opposition
02 Aug 2015  –  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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