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°23' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 22 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 00:02 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 59° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:37.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Saturn at mag -0.1, 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 04h25m00s 22°04'N Taurus -11.6 29'33"0
Saturn 04h25m00s 19°40'N Taurus -0.1 18"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Aug 2030

The sky on 21 August 2030
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:24
Twilight begins
04:23


Waning Crescent

37%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:29 13:41 19:53
Venus 04:44 11:53 19:02
Moon 23:25 06:53 14:25
Mars 03:56 11:16 18:35
Jupiter 12:58 18:00 23:02
Saturn 00:02 07:18 14:34
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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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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