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 2°38' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 12 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:15 (EDT), 17° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:46, 36° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:59, when they sink below 10° 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 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 22h16m10s 15°18'S Aquarius -12.7 33'06"6
Saturn 22h16m10s 12°39'S Aquarius 0.4 18"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 146° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Sep 2023

The sky on 26 September 2023
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
18:43
Twilight ends
20:16
Twilight begins
05:09

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

94%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 11:43 18:10
Venus 03:15 09:58 16:41
Moon 17:43 22:49 04:06
Mars 08:05 13:43 19:21
Jupiter 20:26 03:23 10:20
Saturn 17:28 22:46 04:04
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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08 Sep 2024  –  Saturn at opposition

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
EDT

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