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 4°58' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 27 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 difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:40 (EDT) – 1 hour and 58 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h20m00s 26°48'S Sagittarius -10.4 32'37"8
Saturn 19h20m00s 21°49'S Sagittarius 0.5 15"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Sep 2024

The sky on 28 September 2024
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
18:39
Twilight ends
20:11
Twilight begins
05:12


Waning Crescent

9%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:35 12:37 18:40
Venus 09:23 14:37 19:50
Moon 02:26 09:54 17:11
Mars 23:48 07:19 14:51
Jupiter 22:14 05:42 13:10
Saturn 17:50 23:24 04:58
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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