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 3°17' 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 Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:36 (EST) – 2 hours and 58 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:53.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h32m50s 13°59'S Aquarius -11.7 32'12"5
Saturn 22h32m50s 10°42'S Aquarius 0.8 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 13 May 2023

The sky on 13 May 2023
Sunrise
05:34
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:55
Twilight begins
03:42

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

33%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 11:44 18:27
Venus 08:10 15:55 23:40
Moon 02:50 07:59 13:18
Mars 09:50 17:19 00:48
Jupiter 04:38 11:17 17:56
Saturn 02:36 08:01 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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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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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