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

Conjunction of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 18' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 24 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 01:48 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 43° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:58.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Saturn at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 11h44m10s 3°31'N Virgo -11.0 29'34"6
Saturn 11h44m10s 3°50'N Virgo 1.0 16"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 57° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Nov 2024

The sky on 26 November 2024
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
16:26
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:14

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:25 12:54 17:23
Venus 10:15 14:44 19:13
Moon 02:23 08:13 13:53
Mars 20:39 04:02 11:25
Jupiter 17:09 00:36 08:02
Saturn 12:54 18:26 23:58
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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02 Mar 1980  –  Equinox on Saturn
12 Mar 1980  –  Saturn ring plane crossing

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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