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 3°33' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 9 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 become visible at around 20:13 (EDT), 28° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:40.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.0, 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.

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 17h20m50s 18°24'S Ophiuchus -12.0 29'32"4
Saturn 17h20m50s 21°58'S Ophiuchus 0.2 17"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 103° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Aug 2017

The sky on 30 August 2017
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:17
Twilight begins
05:00

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

66%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:09 12:38 19:08
Venus 03:55 11:03 18:11
Moon 15:07 20:14 01:19
Mars 05:39 12:28 19:18
Jupiter 10:15 15:54 21:33
Saturn 15:06 19:53 00:40
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

25 Aug 2017  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
17 Apr 2018  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 Jun 2018  –  Saturn at opposition
06 Sep 2018  –  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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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