Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°38' of each other. The Moon will be 12 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:10 (EDT), 22° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:24, 71° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:56, when they sink below 8° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6 in Orion; and Saturn will be at mag -0.5 in Gemini.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 06h06m20s 18°52'N Orion -12.6 30'35"7
Saturn 06h07m10s 22°29'N Gemini -0.5 20"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 157° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jan 2033

The sky on 13 January 2033
Sunrise
07:14
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:23
Twilight begins
05:36


Waxing Gibbous

98%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:28 12:03 16:38
Venus 09:31 15:06 20:41
Moon 15:24 22:49 06:11
Mars 02:07 07:14 12:21
Jupiter 08:10 13:05 18:00
Saturn 14:56 22:24 05:52
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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02 Nov 2033  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
07 Jan 2034  –  Saturn at opposition

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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