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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°00' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 17:23 (PDT), 31° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 38 minutes after the Sun at 20:26.

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 -10.8, and Saturn at mag 0.7, 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 21h37m20s 19°30'S Capricornus -10.8 32'54"2
Saturn 21h37m20s 15°29'S Capricornus 0.7 15"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Dec 2022

The sky on 26 December 2022
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
16:48
Twilight ends
18:17
Twilight begins
05:18

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

19%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:06 13:08 18:11
Venus 07:57 12:57 17:56
Moon 10:06 15:21 20:43
Mars 14:44 21:56 05:08
Jupiter 11:29 17:29 23:29
Saturn 09:42 15:04 20:26
All times shown in PST.

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

22 Oct 2022  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
17 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.

Share

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme