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 2°40' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 19 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:49, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:11, 39° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:26, 39° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.6, 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 22h35m40s 13°17'S Aquarius -12.5 32'49"3
Saturn 22h35m40s 10°37'S Aquarius 0.6 18"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 128° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2023

The sky on 6 July 2023
Sunrise
06:06
Sunset
21:03
Twilight ends
23:04
Twilight begins
04:05


Waning Gibbous

76%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:34 14:03 21:33
Venus 09:28 16:17 23:06
Moon 23:22 04:27 09:40
Mars 09:44 16:33 23:22
Jupiter 02:16 09:06 15:56
Saturn 23:44 05:11 10:38
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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