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 2°26' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:16 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 32° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:47.

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 -11.7; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They 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.

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 20h15m00s 22°23'S Capricornus -11.7 30'24"1
Saturn 20h13m30s 19°58'S Capricornus 0.4 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Apr 2020

The sky on 15 April 2020
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:18
Twilight ends
20:45
Twilight begins
04:50

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

40%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 11:41 17:45
Venus 08:22 15:39 22:57
Moon 02:27 07:36 12:48
Mars 02:53 08:06 13:18
Jupiter 01:56 07:02 12:08
Saturn 02:16 07:25 12:34
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

18 Sep 2019  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 May 2020  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
20 Jul 2020  –  Saturn at opposition
28 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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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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