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 55' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 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 become visible at around 17:00 (EST), 18° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 50 minutes after the Sun at 19:15.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 19h16m10s 23°06'S Sagittarius -10.4 30'45"7
Saturn 19h16m10s 22°11'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2019

The sky on 29 November 2019
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
16:25
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:16


Waxing Crescent

15%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:10 10:21 15:31
Venus 09:10 13:38 18:06
Moon 09:55 14:31 19:08
Mars 04:21 09:38 14:54
Jupiter 08:40 13:15 17:50
Saturn 09:55 14:35 19:15
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

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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