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 1°05' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 7 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 18:20 (EDT), 25° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:30.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Saturn at mag 0.3, 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 19h25m10s 23°09'S Sagittarius -11.6 29'48"3
Saturn 19h25m10s 22°03'S Sagittarius 0.3 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2024

The sky on 16 June 2024
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:38
Twilight begins
02:49

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

75%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:11 12:54 20:36
Venus 05:19 12:57 20:36
Moon 15:06 20:38 02:00
Mars 02:27 09:16 16:05
Jupiter 03:51 11:14 18:37
Saturn 00:45 06:26 12:06
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

23 Sep 1990  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
16 May 1991  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
26 Jul 1991  –  Saturn at opposition
04 Oct 1991  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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