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 3'12" to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 23 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:08 (EST) – 3 hours and 32 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:08.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 19h23m50s 21°40'S Sagittarius -11.6 29'46"3
Saturn 19h23m50s 21°37'S Sagittarius 0.4 16"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2019

The sky on 29 March 2019
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:48
Twilight begins
05:06


Waning Crescent

35%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:49 11:33 17:18
Venus 05:24 10:47 16:11
Moon 03:22 08:05 12:49
Mars 08:49 16:10 23:30
Jupiter 01:22 06:00 10:38
Saturn 03:08 07:50 12:33
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

06 Sep 2018  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
29 Apr 2019  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
09 Jul 2019  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Sep 2019  –  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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