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 5°04' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 7 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 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 at mag -0.2, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair 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.

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 07h00m40s 17°29'N Gemini -12.1 31'23"6
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

62%

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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