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 3°33' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:18 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 26° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:44.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.8; and Saturn will be at mag 0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 17h00m10s 17°26'S Ophiuchus -11.8 30'11"3
Saturn 16h58m40s 20°58'S Ophiuchus 0.3 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Mar 2016

The sky on 2 March 2016
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
17:35
Twilight ends
19:09
Twilight begins
04:42

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

41%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:47 10:54 16:00
Venus 05:20 10:22 15:24
Moon 01:06 06:10 11:12
Mars 23:56 04:48 09:40
Jupiter 17:59 00:23 06:48
Saturn 01:19 06:00 10:42
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

02 Aug 2015  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
25 Mar 2016  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
03 Jun 2016  –  Saturn at opposition
13 Aug 2016  –  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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