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°49' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 13 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:42 (EST), 21° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:21, 58° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:07, when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag -0.1, 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 02h15m10s 18°34'N Aries -12.5 29'59"1
Saturn 02h15m10s 10°45'N Aries -0.1 19"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 150° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2028

The sky on 29 November 2028
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:12
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:09


Waxing Gibbous

95%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:24 11:53 16:22
Venus 04:28 09:42 14:55
Moon 14:26 21:51 05:26
Mars 00:08 06:33 12:58
Jupiter 02:44 08:23 14:02
Saturn 14:38 21:21 04:04
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.

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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