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 2°14' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 22 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 02:35, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:25, 31° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:18, 29° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.2, and Saturn at mag 0.2, both in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h12m30s 16°46'S Scorpius -12.2 30'38"7
Saturn 16h12m30s 19°01'S Scorpius 0.2 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 106° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Nov 2024

The sky on 25 November 2024
Sunrise
07:26
Sunset
17:08
Twilight ends
18:44
Twilight begins
05:50

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

24%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:05 13:37 18:09
Venus 10:50 15:22 19:54
Moon 02:03 08:14 14:15
Mars 21:24 04:44 12:04
Jupiter 17:56 01:19 08:42
Saturn 13:35 19:08 00:41
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

20 Jul 2014  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
14 Mar 2015  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
22 May 2015  –  Saturn at opposition
02 Aug 2015  –  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

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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