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 7°18' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will become visible at around 19:49 (PDT), 31° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 40 minutes after the Sun at 23:01.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Saturn at mag 0.3, 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 15h27m40s 24°06'S Libra -11.6 30'01"8
Saturn 15h27m40s 16°48'S Libra 0.3 16"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 79° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jul 2024

The sky on 27 July 2024
Sunrise
05:58
Sunset
19:57
Twilight ends
21:34
Twilight begins
04:20


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:09 14:37 21:05
Venus 07:09 13:58 20:46
Moon 23:26 06:08 13:00
Mars 01:38 08:40 15:41
Jupiter 02:12 09:17 16:23
Saturn 22:06 03:51 09:36
All times shown in PDT.

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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