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 15' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 7 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 18:51 (EST), 25° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:21.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9, and Saturn at mag 0.3, 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 19h00m10s 22°47'S Sagittarius -11.9 30'19"9
Saturn 19h00m10s 22°32'S Sagittarius 0.3 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 91° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Oct 2019

The sky on 5 October 2019
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
18:19
Twilight ends
19:53
Twilight begins
05:09


Waxing Gibbous

56%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:38 13:48 18:59
Venus 07:56 13:25 18:54
Moon 14:18 18:52 23:25
Mars 05:46 11:52 17:57
Jupiter 12:23 16:57 21:31
Saturn 14:12 18:47 23:21
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

18 Sep 2019  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 May 2020  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
20 Jul 2020  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Sep 2020  –  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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