Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°04' of each other. The Moon will be 8 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:48 (EST), 63° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:32.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8; and Saturn will be at mag -0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 03h00m40s 20°08'N Aries -11.8 29'32"4
Saturn 03h05m00s 15°10'N Aries -0.0 18"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 87° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Feb 2030

The sky on 10 February 2030
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
17:19
Twilight ends
18:53
Twilight begins
05:18


Waxing Gibbous

52%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:05 10:51 15:36
Venus 04:19 09:20 14:22
Moon 10:36 18:04 01:37
Mars 07:58 13:40 19:21
Jupiter 01:08 06:05 11:02
Saturn 10:35 17:34 00:32
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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