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 54' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 6 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 20:24 (EDT), 56° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:57.

The Moon will be at mag -11.2, and Saturn at mag -0.1, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h14m40s 21°24'N Gemini -11.2 29'30"8
Saturn 07h14m40s 22°18'N Gemini -0.1 17"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
21:58
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

90%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:47 15:16 21:45
Venus 07:41 14:27 21:14
Moon 21:48 03:17 08:54
Mars 02:26 09:18 16:09
Jupiter 03:07 10:04 17:00
Saturn 22:54 04:41 10:29
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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