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°02' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 18 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:25, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:43, 68° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:36, 47° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Saturn at mag -0.3, 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 04h26m10s 21°37'N Taurus -12.4 29'31"1
Saturn 04h26m10s 19°35'N Taurus -0.3 19"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 133° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Oct 2030

The sky on 15 October 2030
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
18:12
Twilight ends
19:43
Twilight begins
05:29


Waning Gibbous

80%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:16 12:47 18:19
Venus 06:55 12:34 18:12
Moon 20:00 03:28 10:58
Mars 03:17 09:56 16:34
Jupiter 10:06 14:59 19:52
Saturn 20:27 03:43 10:59
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
05 Oct 2031  –  Saturn enters 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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