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 4°04' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 8 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:15 (EST), 70° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 18:44, 71° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:14, when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Saturn at mag -0.3, both in the constellation Orion.

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 05h59m00s 18°35'N Orion -12.1 30'41"4
Saturn 05h59m00s 22°39'N Orion -0.3 18"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 101° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Mar 2033

The sky on 8 March 2033
Sunrise
06:13
Sunset
17:50
Twilight ends
19:22
Twilight begins
04:41


Waxing Gibbous

64%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 10:57 16:30
Venus 06:17 12:56 19:34
Moon 11:23 18:42 01:59
Mars 01:06 05:46 10:26
Jupiter 05:14 10:24 15:33
Saturn 11:15 18:44 02:13
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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01 Mar 2033  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
02 Nov 2033  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
07 Jan 2034  –  Saturn at opposition
15 Mar 2034  –  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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