| Sun, 09 Dec 2018 at | 00:19 EST | (233 days away) |
| 05:19 UTC |
Dominic Ford, Editor
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The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°07' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 2 days old.
From Ashburn (click to change), the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 11° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 17:02 (EDT) as the dusk sky fades, 11° above your south-western horizon. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 35 minutes after the Sun at 18:17.
The Moon will be at mag -9.0, 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 | 18h36m40s | -21°31' | Sagittarius | -9.0 | 29'51"3 |
| Saturn | 18h36m40s | -22°39' | Sagittarius | 0.4 | 15"1 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.
| The sky on 09 December 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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3% 2 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.
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Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.