The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°36' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 26 days old.
At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.
From Fairfield, the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 18° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:29 (EDT) – 2 hours and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks around 06:51.
The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Saturn at mag 0.4, 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 | 17h32m30s | -18°23' | Ophiuchus | -10.3 | 29'44"1 |
| Saturn | 17h32m30s | -22°00' | Ophiuchus | 0.4 | 15"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.
| The sky on 24 January 2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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12% 26 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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
| 10 Dec 2016 | – Saturn at solar conjunction |
| 15 Jun 2017 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 21 Dec 2017 | – Saturn at solar conjunction |
| 17 Apr 2018 | – Saturn at aphelion |
Image credit
None available.