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 3°50' of each other. The Moon will be 8 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:02 (EDT), 29° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:11, 31° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:01, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.3. 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 20h40m20s 23°10'S Capricornus -12.2 31'34"8
Saturn 20h36m40s 19°25'S Capricornus 0.3 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 105° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Oct 2021

The sky on 14 October 2021
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
18:32
Twilight ends
20:01
Twilight begins
05:47

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

68%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:29 12:17 18:05
Venus 11:19 15:56 20:32
Moon 15:57 20:53 01:54
Mars 07:07 12:47 18:27
Jupiter 16:01 21:13 02:25
Saturn 15:14 20:11 01:08
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.

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22 Oct 2022  –  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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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