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°29' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h25m00s 14°51'S Aquarius -11.0 32'27"4
Saturn 22h25m00s 11°21'S Aquarius 0.8 15"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Apr 2023

The sky on 15 April 2023
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:25
Twilight ends
21:07
Twilight begins
04:20


Waning Crescent

15%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:35 13:50 21:06
Venus 07:45 15:19 22:53
Moon 04:11 09:01 14:00
Mars 10:11 17:55 01:39
Jupiter 06:02 12:34 19:05
Saturn 04:14 09:35 14:56
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.

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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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