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 8°20' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:05, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:37, 55° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:54, 34° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.1, 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 01h41m00s 15°53'N Pisces -12.5 30'35"5
Saturn 01h41m00s 7°32'N Pisces 0.1 19"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 145° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Sep 2027

The sky on 18 September 2027
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
18:49
Twilight ends
20:24
Twilight begins
04:48


Waning Gibbous

88%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:40 14:07 19:34
Venus 07:17 13:16 19:15
Moon 19:17 02:06 09:08
Mars 10:21 15:26 20:31
Jupiter 05:13 11:47 18:20
Saturn 20:06 02:37 09:08
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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23 Dec 2027  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
22 Aug 2028  –  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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