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 1°44' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 15 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 be visible between 20:02 and 06:01. They will become accessible at around 20:02, when they rise to an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 01:02, 48° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:01 when they sink below 10° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h34m00s 0°58'N Virgo -12.7 31'14"8
Saturn 12h34m00s 0°45'S Virgo 0.4 19"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 175° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2024

The sky on 2 July 2024
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:14


Waning Crescent

10%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:52 14:17 21:43
Venus 05:57 13:29 21:00
Moon 02:09 09:49 17:42
Mars 02:06 09:07 16:08
Jupiter 03:13 10:34 17:56
Saturn 23:50 05:32 11:13
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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06 Jun 2040  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
01 Feb 2041  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion

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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