The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°03' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 days old.
From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 16:50 (EST), 16° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 36 minutes after the Sun at 18:48.
The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Capricornus.
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 | 20h07m50s | 23°38'S | Capricornus | -10.1 | 31'46"9 |
| Saturn | 20h07m50s | 20°34'S | Capricornus | 0.5 | 15"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.
The sky on 17 Dec 2020
| The sky on 17 December 2020 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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11% 3 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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.