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 1°59' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 12 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:48 (EDT), 19° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:53, 26° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:22, 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 -12.4, and Saturn at mag 0.0, 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 18h15m50s 20°34'S Sagittarius -12.4 29'30"1
Saturn 18h15m50s 22°34'S Sagittarius 0.0 18"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 151° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2018

The sky on 25 July 2018
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:12
Twilight begins
03:43

12-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

96%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:36 14:17 20:57
Venus 09:28 15:51 22:14
Moon 18:47 23:39 04:32
Mars 20:49 01:14 05:40
Jupiter 14:14 19:23 00:33
Saturn 18:15 22:53 03:32
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

27 Jun 2018  –  Saturn at opposition
06 Sep 2018  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
29 Apr 2019  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
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.

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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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