The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°37' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.
From Ashburn, the pair will become visible around 20:24 (EDT) as the dusk sky fades, 30° above your southern horizon. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 5 hours and 7 minutes after the Sun at 01:12.
The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Saturn at mag 0.2, 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.
At around the same time, the two objects 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 two objects at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 16h34m40s | -16°41' | Ophiuchus | -12.1 | 29'50"5 |
| Saturn | 16h32m30s | -20°17' | Ophiuchus | 0.2 | 17"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 109° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
| The sky on 12 August 2016 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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66% 10 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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 |
| 15 Jun 2017 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 27 Jun 2018 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 09 Jul 2019 | – 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.