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 3°21' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 18 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:18, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:54, 44° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:12, 24° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h34m10s 15°40'S Libra -12.7 32'25"3
Saturn 14h34m10s 12°19'S Libra 0.1 18"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 147° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:14

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

79%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 13:50 20:27
Venus 05:59 11:50 17:40
Moon 22:33 03:45 08:52
Mars 05:12 10:47 16:21
Jupiter 08:29 15:14 22:00
Saturn 05:36 11:18 16:59
All times shown in PDT.

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

18 Feb 2013  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
28 Apr 2013  –  Saturn at opposition
07 Jul 2013  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
02 Mar 2014  –  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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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