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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°14' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 14 days old.

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

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 21:11 (EDT), 18° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:04, 30° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:53, when they sink below 9° above your south-western horizon.

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 -12.5, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 16h41m50s 17°10'S Ophiuchus -12.5 29'54"0
Saturn 16h41m50s 20°25'S Ophiuchus 0.0 18"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 162° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Jun 2016

The sky on 18 June 2016
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:38
Twilight ends
22:38
Twilight begins
03:41

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:36 11:48 18:59
Venus 05:56 13:23 20:51
Moon 18:00 --:-- 04:37
Mars 17:50 22:41 03:32
Jupiter 12:01 18:27 00:53
Saturn 19:11 00:04 04:57
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

03 Jun 2016  –  Saturn at opposition
13 Aug 2016  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
06 Apr 2017  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
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.

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme