The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°54' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 4 days old.
From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 21:00 (EDT), 18° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 27 minutes after the Sun at 22:52.
The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Gemini.
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 | 07h49m50s | 26°11'N | Gemini | -9.9 | 29'30"1 |
| Saturn | 07h49m50s | 21°16'N | Gemini | 0.1 | 16"8 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 16 Jul 2024
| The sky on 16 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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82% 11 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 21 Mar 2005 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 22 Nov 2005 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 27 Jan 2006 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 05 Apr 2006 | – 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.