The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°11' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 2 days old.
From Fairfield however, the pair will be visible from soon after it rises, at 08:57, until soon before it sets at 18:51. Always take extreme caution when trying to make daytime observations of the Moon while the Sun is above the horizon.
The Moon will be at mag -9.7, 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.
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 | 20h58m40s | -22°10' | Capricornus | -9.7 | 32'43"5 |
| Saturn | 20h58m40s | -17°59' | Capricornus | 0.6 | 15"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.
The sky on 04 Jan 2022
| The sky on 04 January 2022 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
8% 2 days old |
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.
Related news
| 02 Aug 2021 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 14 Aug 2022 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 27 Aug 2023 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 08 Sep 2024 | – 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.