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°39' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 23 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:09 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 53° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:59.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5 in the constellation Aries, and Saturn at mag -0.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Taurus.

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 03h27m10s 22°10'N Aries -11.5 29'46"9
Saturn 03h27m10s 16°30'N Taurus -0.0 17"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Aug 2029

The sky on 3 August 2029
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
20:42
Twilight ends
22:30
Twilight begins
04:41


Waning Crescent

33%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:25 15:04 21:44
Venus 09:22 15:49 22:15
Moon 00:28 07:58 15:34
Mars 12:55 18:21 23:46
Jupiter 12:19 17:59 23:38
Saturn 01:09 08:09 15:10
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

05 Jan 2029  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
06 Sep 2029  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
13 Nov 2029  –  Saturn at opposition
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.

Share