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°30' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 23 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 dawn sky, rising at 03:11 (EST) – 2 hours and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:10.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.5, 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 21h45m00s 19°06'S Capricornus -11.5 31'43"6
Saturn 21h45m00s 14°35'S Capricornus 0.6 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 72° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Apr 2022

The sky on 24 April 2022
Sunrise
05:47
Sunset
19:35
Twilight ends
21:21
Twilight begins
04:01

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

29%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 13:56 21:21
Venus 04:14 10:01 15:47
Moon 03:18 07:58 12:45
Mars 03:46 09:10 14:35
Jupiter 04:28 10:22 16:16
Saturn 03:11 08:19 13:27
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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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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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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