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

Conjunction of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°51' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 4 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 16:53 (EDT), 24° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 20:25.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.2, 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 19h57m00s 23°55'S Sagittarius -11.2 31'32"7
Saturn 19h57m00s 21°04'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 59° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Nov 2020

The sky on 19 November 2020
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
16:18
Twilight ends
17:57
Twilight begins
05:00

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

29%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 10:25 15:37
Venus 04:02 09:32 15:02
Moon 11:23 15:58 20:37
Mars 14:19 20:43 03:06
Jupiter 10:51 15:29 20:07
Saturn 11:03 15:44 20:25
All times shown in EST.

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 Sep 2020  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
23 May 2021  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
02 Aug 2021  –  Saturn at opposition
10 Oct 2021  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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