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°56' of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 17:43 (EST), 33° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:32.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. 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 21h34m20s 19°54'S Capricornus -11.6 32'21"3
Saturn 21h29m00s 16°11'S Capricornus 0.5 16"4

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

The sky on 29 Nov 2022

The sky on 29 November 2022
Sunrise
07:30
Sunset
17:07
Twilight ends
18:43
Twilight begins
05:53

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

40%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:35 13:07 17:39
Venus 08:19 12:59 17:38
Moon 13:05 18:08 23:20
Mars 17:35 01:11 08:46
Jupiter 13:56 19:53 01:49
Saturn 12:19 17:25 22:32
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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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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Columbus

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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