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 4°00' of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:11 (EST), 29° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:04.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h43m40s 23°07'S Capricornus -11.8 31'52"8
Saturn 20h39m50s 19°13'S Capricornus 0.4 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 79° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Nov 2021

The sky on 10 November 2021
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
16:38
Twilight ends
18:13
Twilight begins
04:57


Waxing Crescent

45%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 10:54 16:12
Venus 10:35 14:52 19:10
Moon 12:53 17:31 22:14
Mars 05:38 10:52 16:07
Jupiter 13:04 18:14 23:23
Saturn 12:19 17:11 22:04
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.

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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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