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 2°43' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:47 (EST) – 2 hours and 8 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:23.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h59m20s 15°00'N Cancer -9.4 32'36"0
Saturn 08h59m20s 17°43'N Cancer 0.3 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Aug 2035

The sky on 31 August 2035
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
05:18


Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:17 15:06 20:55
Venus 07:25 13:54 20:24
Moon 05:14 12:16 19:10
Mars 21:11 02:50 08:29
Jupiter 23:05 06:06 13:07
Saturn 04:47 11:53 18:58
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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