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 8°11' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 9 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 21:04 (EDT), 44° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 02:07.

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 -12.3, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h41m50s 9°53'S Virgo -12.3 32'28"3
Saturn 12h41m50s 1°42'S Virgo 0.6 18"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 113° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2024

The sky on 28 June 2024
Sunrise
05:07
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:52

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

47%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:17 13:54 21:31
Venus 05:37 13:14 20:52
Moon 00:16 06:19 12:35
Mars 02:02 09:03 16:03
Jupiter 03:13 10:38 18:03
Saturn 23:58 05:39 11:20
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

03 Apr 2011  –  Saturn at opposition
13 Jun 2011  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
07 Feb 2012  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 Apr 2012  –  Saturn at opposition

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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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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