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 1°15' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:38 (EST) – 1 hour and 55 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:57.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Saturn at mag 0.5, 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 15h00m30s 16°08'S Libra -9.2 32'28"9
Saturn 15h00m30s 14°52'S Libra 0.5 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Nov 2024

The sky on 27 November 2024
Sunrise
07:28
Sunset
17:07
Twilight ends
18:43
Twilight begins
05:52

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

10%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:54 13:28 18:02
Venus 10:51 15:24 19:58
Moon 04:02 09:32 14:54
Mars 21:18 04:37 11:57
Jupiter 17:47 01:10 08:33
Saturn 13:27 19:01 00:34
All times shown in EST.

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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Columbus

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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