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°25' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:50 (EST), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 57 minutes after the Sun at 22:14.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6, and Saturn at mag -0.0, both in the constellation 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 06h26m30s 18°17'N Gemini -9.6 31'24"6
Saturn 06h26m30s 22°43'N Gemini -0.0 16"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 30 May 2033

The sky on 30 May 2033
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:20
Twilight begins
03:18


Waxing Crescent

8%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:40 14:23 22:05
Venus 03:20 09:48 16:16
Moon 07:37 14:55 22:11
Mars 22:48 03:13 07:38
Jupiter 01:24 06:51 12:18
Saturn 07:15 14:45 22:14
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.

Related news

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.

Share