The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 31.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Saturn, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:11, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:15, 35° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:13, 33° above your southern 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 will be at mag 0.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 19h25m40s 22°07'S Sagittarius -12.4 30'07"9
Saturn 19h25m30s 21°36'S Sagittarius 0.2 17"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 131° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 May 2019

The sky on 22 May 2019
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:06

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

79%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:49 12:49 19:50
Venus 04:38 11:15 17:52
Moon 22:39 03:49 08:59
Mars 07:54 15:05 22:16
Jupiter 21:11 02:13 07:14
Saturn 23:11 04:15 09:19
All times shown in PDT.

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

29 Apr 2019  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
09 Jul 2019  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Sep 2019  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 May 2020  –  Saturn enters 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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