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°02' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 16 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:08, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:39, 44° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:01, 33° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7, 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 21h45m30s 18°51'S Capricornus -12.7 32'54"5
Saturn 21h45m30s 14°48'S Capricornus 0.4 18"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 150° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jul 2022

The sky on 15 July 2022
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:04
Twilight begins
04:57

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

90%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:25 13:26 20:27
Venus 04:39 11:38 18:38
Moon 21:54 03:06 08:23
Mars 01:42 08:13 14:45
Jupiter 00:18 06:25 12:32
Saturn 22:12 03:39 09:06
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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17 Jun 2023  –  Saturn enters 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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30.33°N
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