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 4°01' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 17 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:40, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:30, 31° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 04:42, 28° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair 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.

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 20h59m40s 21°49'S Capricornus -12.6 32'03"8
Saturn 20h59m40s 17°47'S Capricornus 0.3 18"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 144° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jun 2021

The sky on 27 June 2021
Sunrise
05:19
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:11


Waning Gibbous

87%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:21 11:33 18:45
Venus 07:15 14:40 22:04
Moon 22:46 03:24 08:09
Mars 08:04 15:18 22:31
Jupiter 23:25 04:47 10:08
Saturn 22:32 03:30 08:28
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

23 May 2021  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
02 Aug 2021  –  Saturn at opposition
10 Oct 2021  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
04 Jun 2022  –  Saturn enters 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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