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 1°09' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 18:52, when they reach an altitude of 8° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:17, 71° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:05, 15° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Saturn at mag -0.5, 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 05h17m00s 20°19'N Taurus -12.6 29'56"9
Saturn 05h17m00s 21°28'N Taurus -0.5 20"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 166° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2031

The sky on 29 November 2031
Sunrise
07:29
Sunset
17:07
Twilight ends
18:43
Twilight begins
05:53


Waning Gibbous

97%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:33 12:23 17:12
Venus 03:52 09:31 15:09
Moon 17:11 00:31 07:53
Mars 11:42 16:35 21:27
Jupiter 09:30 14:09 18:47
Saturn 17:57 01:17 08:37
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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11 Dec 2031  –  Saturn at opposition
16 Feb 2032  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
18 Oct 2032  –  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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