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 2°46' of each other. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:25 (EDT), 23° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 4 minutes after the Sun at 22:52.

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 -11.6; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

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 14h13m40s 13°55'S Virgo -11.6 31'31"5
Saturn 14h16m30s 11°13'S Virgo 0.5 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 75° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:43
Twilight begins
04:53

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

82%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:54 13:46 20:38
Venus 05:59 11:45 17:31
Moon 22:47 03:35 08:15
Mars 05:20 10:43 16:05
Jupiter 08:06 15:10 22:14
Saturn 05:41 11:14 16:47
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

08 Jul 2013  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
02 Mar 2014  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
10 May 2014  –  Saturn at opposition
20 Jul 2014  –  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.

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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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