The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°35' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.
From Cambridge, the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 11° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:28 (EDT) – 1 hour and 39 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 11° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks around 05:48.
The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Saturn at mag 0.6, 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.
At around the same time, the two objects 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 two objects at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 20h50m00s | -21°56' | Capricornus | -10.4 | 31'01"8 |
| Saturn | 20h46m40s | -18°26' | Capricornus | 0.6 | 15"5 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.
| The sky on 09 March 2021 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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11% 26 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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
| 20 Jul 2020 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 02 Aug 2021 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 14 Aug 2022 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 27 Aug 2023 | – 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.