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 11 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:56 (EST), 35° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:59, 54° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:24, when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Saturn at mag 0.2, 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 01h20m50s 14°00'N Pisces -12.4 30'42"6
Saturn 01h20m50s 5°40'N Pisces 0.2 19"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 126° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Dec 2027

The sky on 9 December 2027
Sunrise
07:03
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:24


Waxing Gibbous

84%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:04 11:37 16:11
Venus 09:23 13:55 18:27
Moon 13:23 20:27 03:42
Mars 08:53 13:24 17:56
Jupiter 00:12 06:26 12:39
Saturn 13:36 19:59 02:22
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.

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22 Aug 2028  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
30 Oct 2028  –  Saturn at opposition

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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