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 46' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 11 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 in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:13 (EDT), 23° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:32, 26° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:59, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

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

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 18h39m30s 21°52'S Sagittarius -12.5 32'36"8
Saturn 18h39m30s 22°39'S Sagittarius 0.1 17"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 131° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Sep 2024

The sky on 27 September 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
18:40
Twilight ends
20:13
Twilight begins
05:11


Waning Crescent

19%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 12:35 18:40
Venus 09:21 14:36 19:51
Moon 01:20 09:08 16:44
Mars 23:49 07:21 14:53
Jupiter 22:18 05:46 13:14
Saturn 17:54 23:28 05:02
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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