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°39' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h12m00s 18°33'N Aries -9.2 30'28"8
Saturn 02h12m00s 10°54'N Aries 0.3 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 May 2028

The sky on 22 May 2028
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
22:09
Twilight begins
03:27


Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:16 13:47 21:19
Venus 06:06 13:49 21:32
Moon 03:59 11:17 18:45
Mars 04:46 11:52 18:57
Jupiter 13:38 20:03 02:28
Saturn 04:20 11:02 17:44
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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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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