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 sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 2.3 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 11 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:22 (EDT), 19° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:23, 25° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:45, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Saturn will be at mag 0.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 19h03m40s 22°24'S Sagittarius -12.4 30'00"2
Saturn 19h03m30s 22°21'S Sagittarius 0.1 18"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 145° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Aug 2019

The sky on 12 August 2019
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
19:50
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
03:55

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

93%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:14 11:32 18:50
Venus 05:42 12:48 19:53
Moon 18:18 23:00 03:44
Mars 06:21 13:16 20:11
Jupiter 15:35 20:11 00:48
Saturn 17:47 22:23 02:58
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

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

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42.38°N
71.11°W
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