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°09' 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 Melbourne , the pair will become visible at around 21:00 (AEST), 47° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:11.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Saturn at mag 0.5, 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 21h29m00s 20°21'S Capricornus -11.6 32'23"0
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 71° 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
05:50
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
04:00

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

39%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 13:54 21:21
Venus 06:25 13:46 21:06
Moon 10:55 18:22 01:38
Mars 21:23 02:02 06:41
Jupiter 14:35 20:43 02:52
Saturn 11:21 18:16 01:11
All times shown in AEDT.

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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18 Jun 2023  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 Aug 2023  –  Saturn at opposition
04 Nov 2023  –  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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37.81°S
144.96°E
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