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°31' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 14 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible between 17:02 and 05:10. They will become accessible at around 17:02, when they rise to an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:06, 64° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:10 when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Saturn at mag -0.3, 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 03h15m00s 21°01'N Aries -12.6 29'27"2
Saturn 03h15m00s 15°30'N Aries -0.3 20"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 173° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Nov 2029

The sky on 20 November 2029
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
16:29
Twilight ends
18:06
Twilight begins
05:07


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 12:25 16:58
Venus 10:27 14:47 19:08
Moon 16:05 23:35 07:11
Mars 10:15 14:46 19:17
Jupiter 05:21 10:32 15:43
Saturn 16:06 23:06 06:05
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

13 Nov 2029  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Jan 2030  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
20 Sep 2030  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 Nov 2030  –  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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