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 2°43' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 25 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 in the dawn sky, rising at 01:41 (EST) – 3 hours and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 36° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:06.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9, and Saturn at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h16m40s 22°07'N Taurus -10.9 29'30"0
Saturn 04h16m40s 19°24'N Taurus -0.0 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2030

The sky on 25 July 2030
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:12
Twilight begins
03:42


Waning Crescent

18%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:55 14:41 21:27
Venus 03:50 11:20 18:50
Moon 01:28 09:00 16:34
Mars 04:15 11:47 19:19
Jupiter 14:34 19:39 00:44
Saturn 01:41 08:56 16:11
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.

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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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