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 6°39' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 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 difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 15° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 21:00 (EDT), 15° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 7 minutes after the Sun at 22:24.

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 -10.8, and Saturn at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 11h21m00s 0°17'S Leo -10.8 32'18"5
Saturn 11h21m00s 6°21'N Leo 0.9 16"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2024

The sky on 1 July 2024
Sunrise
05:21
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:14

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

16%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:46 14:14 21:41
Venus 05:56 13:27 20:59
Moon 01:37 08:55 16:27
Mars 02:08 09:08 16:08
Jupiter 03:16 10:37 17:59
Saturn 23:54 05:36 11:17
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

16 May 2009  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 Aug 2009  –  Equinox on Saturn
04 Sep 2009  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
13 Jan 2010  –  Saturn enters 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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