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°02' to the south 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 20:26 (EDT), 26° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:58, 26° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:29, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, 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 17h27m10s 23°05'S Ophiuchus -12.4 32'16"6
Saturn 17h27m10s 22°03'S Ophiuchus 0.1 17"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 124° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2024

The sky on 3 July 2024
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:35
Twilight begins
03:15


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 14:20 21:44
Venus 06:00 13:30 21:00
Moon 02:47 10:46 18:54
Mars 02:04 09:06 16:08
Jupiter 03:09 10:31 17:53
Saturn 23:46 05:28 11:09
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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28 Jun 2077  –  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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