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°23' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 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 become visible at around 20:19 (EST), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:51.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8 in the constellation Orion, and Saturn at mag -0.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

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 06h13m20s 18°22'N Orion -10.8 31'21"3
Saturn 06h13m20s 22°46'N Gemini -0.1 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 50° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 2 May 2033

The sky on 2 May 2033
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
19:50
Twilight ends
21:37
Twilight begins
03:59


Waxing Crescent

22%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:26 19:15
Venus 04:03 10:08 16:13
Moon 08:56 16:15 23:33
Mars 00:17 04:48 09:19
Jupiter 03:06 08:29 13:51
Saturn 08:52 16:22 23:51
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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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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