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°17' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 17:51 (EDT), 50° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:46.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3, 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 02h17m00s 18°36'N Aries -11.3 29'36"2
Saturn 02h17m00s 11°18'N Aries 0.2 17"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 67° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Feb 2029

The sky on 19 February 2029
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
17:20
Twilight ends
18:55
Twilight begins
04:58


Waxing Crescent

35%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 10:24 15:12
Venus 06:20 11:27 16:34
Moon 08:49 16:15 23:49
Mars 20:45 02:40 08:35
Jupiter 21:58 03:28 08:57
Saturn 09:15 16:01 22:46
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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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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