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 2°27' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 25 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 visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:12 (EDT) – 2 hours and 39 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 17° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:18.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h24m10s 19°58'S Sagittarius -10.6 29'26"3
Saturn 18h24m10s 22°26'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Feb 2018

The sky on 11 February 2018
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
17:21
Twilight ends
18:55
Twilight begins
05:17

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

12%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:51 11:51 16:51
Venus 07:20 12:39 17:57
Moon 03:53 08:49 13:44
Mars 02:15 06:59 11:42
Jupiter 00:46 05:46 10:47
Saturn 04:12 08:51 13:29
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

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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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