Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°03' of each other. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:37 (EST), 71° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 03:00.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1; and Saturn will be at mag -0.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 06h58m50s 17°31'N Gemini -12.1 31'24"4
Saturn 07h00m40s 22°33'N Gemini -0.2 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 97° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Mar 2034

The sky on 27 March 2034
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
19:11
Twilight ends
20:45
Twilight begins
05:08


Waxing Gibbous

61%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:05 11:40 17:14
Venus 07:33 14:11 20:48
Moon 12:34 19:48 02:59
Mars 08:34 15:47 22:59
Jupiter 06:20 12:11 18:02
Saturn 12:03 19:31 03:00
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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