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 6°08' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:19, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:26, 33° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:14, 13° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h54m40s 20°07'S Libra -12.5 29'23"9
Saturn 14h54m40s 13°58'S Libra 0.1 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 166° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2024

The sky on 25 July 2024
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
03:26


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:32 21:13
Venus 06:38 13:47 20:56
Moon 22:20 04:15 10:24
Mars 01:12 08:33 15:55
Jupiter 01:47 09:15 16:44
Saturn 22:12 03:51 09:30
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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