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°06' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 6 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 be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:01 (EST), 28° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 17:03, 28° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 20:39, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Saturn at mag 0.4, 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 20h39m50s 23°19'S Capricornus -11.7 31'54"5
Saturn 20h39m50s 19°13'S Capricornus 0.4 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Nov 2021

The sky on 10 November 2021
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
16:26
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
04:50

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

45%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 10:46 16:01
Venus 10:32 14:44 18:56
Moon 12:48 17:22 22:01
Mars 05:31 10:44 15:56
Jupiter 12:58 18:05 23:12
Saturn 12:13 17:03 21:52
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.

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14 Aug 2022  –  Saturn at opposition
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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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