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°12' 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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:44 (EST), 26° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:12, 27° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:45, 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 Ophiuchus.

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 16h39m40s 19°17'S Ophiuchus -12.5 32'48"1
Saturn 16h39m40s 20°30'S Ophiuchus 0.1 17"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 130° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
16:16
Twilight ends
17:55
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Crescent

46%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:36 12:57 17:19
Venus 10:09 14:31 18:53
Moon 22:03 05:23 12:29
Mars 20:40 04:06 11:33
Jupiter 17:14 00:45 08:16
Saturn 13:02 18:32 00:03
All times shown in EST.

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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16 Jun 2076  –  Saturn at opposition

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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