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 4°39' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 5 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 become visible at around 18:19 (EDT), 49° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:54.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 03h11m50s 20°24'N Aries -11.1 29'30"7
Saturn 03h11m50s 15°45'N Aries 0.0 17"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 62° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Mar 2030

The sky on 9 March 2030
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
17:51
Twilight ends
19:23
Twilight begins
04:40


Waxing Crescent

30%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:21 12:03 17:45
Venus 03:57 08:59 14:02
Moon 08:29 15:57 23:31
Mars 06:59 13:10 19:21
Jupiter 23:29 04:25 09:20
Saturn 08:54 15:54 22:54
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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20 Sep 2030  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 Nov 2030  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Feb 2031  –  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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