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 35.6 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 5 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:20 (EST), 24° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 21:50.

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 -11.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. 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 19h06m10s 23°01'S Sagittarius -11.3 30'37"1
Saturn 19h06m00s 22°26'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 65° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Nov 2019

The sky on 2 November 2019
Sunrise
07:22
Sunset
17:47
Twilight ends
19:21
Twilight begins
05:49

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

34%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:01 13:42 18:24
Venus 09:13 14:00 18:46
Moon 13:06 17:44 22:23
Mars 05:37 11:17 16:57
Jupiter 11:01 15:37 20:13
Saturn 12:32 17:11 21:50
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

18 Sep 2019  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 May 2020  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
20 Jul 2020  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Sep 2020  –  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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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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