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 a mere 21.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Ashburn however, the pair will be visible from soon after it rises, at 12:21, until soon before it sets at 22:46.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.4; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 15h04m10s -14°47' Libra -11.4 30'46"2
Saturn 15h03m50s -15°07' Libra 0.4 16"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 05 Jun 2023

The sky on 05 June 2023
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:32
Twilight ends
22:29
Twilight begins
03:45

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

94%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:38 11:32 18:27
Venus 09:01 16:23 23:46
Moon 21:39 02:10 06:40
Mars 09:51 17:00 00:10
Jupiter 03:41 10:23 17:05
Saturn 01:23 06:51 12:20
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

10 May 2014  –  Saturn at opposition
22 May 2015  –  Saturn at opposition
03 Jun 2016  –  Saturn at opposition
15 Jun 2017  –  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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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