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 14" 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:12, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:21, 52° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:28, 52° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Saturn at mag 0.8, 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 11h51m10s 3°12'N Virgo -11.7 29'34"3
Saturn 11h51m10s 3°12'N Virgo 0.8 17"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 83° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2024

The sky on 16 June 2024
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:08

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

76%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 13:02 20:40
Venus 05:32 13:06 20:40
Moon 15:13 20:47 02:11
Mars 02:38 09:24 16:11
Jupiter 04:03 11:22 18:42
Saturn 00:53 06:34 12:16
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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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
EDT

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