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 5°54' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:09, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:46, 42° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:58, 24° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Saturn will be at mag 0.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

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 13h42m30s 14°02'S Virgo -12.7 32'55"1
Saturn 13h49m30s 8°23'S Virgo 0.2 18"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 141° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
05:25

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

80%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 14:12 20:58
Venus 06:23 12:11 17:59
Moon 23:04 04:01 08:52
Mars 05:41 11:08 16:35
Jupiter 08:39 15:36 22:33
Saturn 06:03 11:39 17:15
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

07 Feb 2012  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 Apr 2012  –  Saturn at opposition
25 Jun 2012  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
18 Feb 2013  –  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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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