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 5°59' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:59 (PDT) – 1 hour and 38 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:06.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, 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 03h06m50s 21°19'N Aries -9.5 29'45"3
Saturn 03h06m50s 15°19'N Aries 0.2 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jun 2029

The sky on 9 June 2029
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
03:53


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:26 11:13 17:59
Venus 07:03 14:17 21:32
Moon 03:40 10:49 18:03
Mars 13:39 19:41 01:44
Jupiter 14:54 20:42 02:30
Saturn 04:00 10:45 17:31
All times shown in PDT.

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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18 Jan 2030  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

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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