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°15' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:27 (EST), 61° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:04, 69° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:26, when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Saturn will be at mag -0.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 07h58m30s 16°46'N Cancer -12.4 31'57"8
Saturn 08h00m50s 20°59'N Cancer -0.2 19"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 120° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Mar 2035

The sky on 19 March 2035
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:35
Twilight begins
05:23


Waxing Gibbous

79%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:33 12:05 17:38
Venus 05:32 10:43 15:54
Moon 14:46 21:53 04:53
Mars 03:29 08:05 12:40
Jupiter 07:52 14:18 20:45
Saturn 13:42 21:04 04:26
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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30 Nov 2035  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
04 Feb 2036  –  Saturn at opposition

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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