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°43' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 18:30 and 06:08. They will become accessible at around 18:30, when they rise to an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:19, 58° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:08 when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Saturn at mag -0.2, 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 02h23m00s 19°04'N Aries -12.6 29'55"2
Saturn 02h23m00s 11°21'N Aries -0.2 20"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 175° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Nov 2028

The sky on 2 November 2028
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
17:35
Twilight ends
19:10
Twilight begins
05:41


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:20 11:47 17:13
Venus 04:24 10:23 16:21
Moon 16:50 00:10 07:40
Mars 01:40 08:25 15:09
Jupiter 05:04 10:50 16:36
Saturn 17:34 00:19 07:04
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.

Related news

30 Oct 2028  –  Saturn at opposition
05 Jan 2029  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
06 Sep 2029  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
13 Nov 2029  –  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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