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

Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 29.3 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 20:14 (EDT), 22° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 45 minutes after the Sun at 22:28.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 14h39m20s 13°44'S Libra -11.3 32'22"2
Saturn 14h40m10s 13°17'S Libra 0.4 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
21:00
Twilight begins
05:27

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:29 14:14 20:59
Venus 06:24 12:10 17:56
Moon 22:00 03:15 08:23
Mars 05:43 11:09 16:35
Jupiter 08:42 15:39 22:36
Saturn 06:07 11:43 17:19
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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07 Mar 1985  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 May 1985  –  Saturn at opposition
25 Jul 1985  –  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.

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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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