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 4°09' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 21 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:22 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 37° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:08.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.9, 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 21h02m10s 21°39'S Capricornus -11.9 31'14"0
Saturn 21h02m10s 17°29'S Capricornus 0.5 16"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 91° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 3 May 2021

The sky on 3 May 2021
Sunrise
06:39
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
05:11

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

45%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:27 14:23 21:20
Venus 07:14 14:01 20:49
Moon 02:20 07:29 12:41
Mars 09:58 17:04 00:10
Jupiter 03:11 08:43 14:15
Saturn 02:22 07:42 13:02
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

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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Jacksonville

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EST

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