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°04' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 23 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 dawn sky, rising at 00:38 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 61° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:28.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h30m50s 20°15'N Cancer -11.5 29'34"2
Saturn 08h30m50s 19°10'N Cancer 0.0 17"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 74° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
03:40


Waning Gibbous

92%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:00 14:43 21:25
Venus 06:45 13:54 21:03
Moon 21:35 02:43 08:00
Mars 01:27 08:44 16:01
Jupiter 02:06 09:30 16:54
Saturn 22:27 04:08 09:48
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.

Related news

17 Mar 2093  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
17 Nov 2093  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
23 Jan 2094  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Apr 2094  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share