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 4°44' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:15, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:38, 71° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:44, 57° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Saturn will be at mag -0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation 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 07h26m50s 16°45'N Gemini -12.4 31'21"3
Saturn 07h29m30s 21°27'N Gemini -0.3 19"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 117° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Nov 2033

The sky on 11 November 2033
Sunrise
07:09
Sunset
17:18
Twilight ends
18:51
Twilight begins
05:36


Waning Gibbous

68%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:32 11:03 16:34
Venus 06:03 11:24 16:45
Moon 21:19 04:30 11:37
Mars 13:21 18:21 23:22
Jupiter 13:50 19:07 00:24
Saturn 21:17 04:38 11:58
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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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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