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 7°10' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:06 (EST), 14° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 55 minutes after the Sun at 20:27.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Saturn at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 00h54m20s 10°32'N Pisces -9.5 30'53"5
Saturn 00h54m20s 3°22'N Pisces 0.7 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Mar 2027

The sky on 10 March 2027
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
18:32
Twilight ends
20:02
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Crescent

8%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 11:00 16:16
Venus 05:10 10:12 15:15
Moon 07:38 14:18 21:10
Mars 16:02 23:06 06:11
Jupiter 15:41 22:42 05:42
Saturn 07:59 14:13 20:27
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

10 Dec 2026  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
09 Aug 2027  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
17 Oct 2027  –  Saturn at opposition
23 Dec 2027  –  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.

Share