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°17' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible between 19:57 and 06:54. They will become accessible at around 19:57, when they rise to an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 01:26, 66° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:54 when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, 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 01h33m40s 15°04'N Pisces -12.6 30'45"1
Saturn 01h33m40s 6°47'N Pisces 0.1 19"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 172° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Oct 2027

The sky on 15 October 2027
Sunrise
07:25
Sunset
18:55
Twilight ends
20:15
Twilight begins
06:05


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:10 13:39 19:09
Venus 08:48 14:17 19:45
Moon 18:16 00:46 07:24
Mars 10:26 15:38 20:49
Jupiter 04:47 11:04 17:21
Saturn 19:07 01:26 07:44
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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17 Oct 2027  –  Saturn at opposition
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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