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 4'38" to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 21 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 00:10 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 39° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:35.

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 -12.2, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 23h22m50s 6°03'S Aquarius -12.2 32'20"4
Saturn 23h22m50s 6°07'S Aquarius 0.8 17"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 106° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jun 2024

The sky on 27 June 2024
Sunrise
05:19
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:11

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

59%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:25 13:58 21:32
Venus 05:48 13:22 20:55
Moon 00:01 05:40 11:31
Mars 02:15 09:12 16:09
Jupiter 03:29 10:50 18:11
Saturn 00:10 05:52 11:33
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.

Related news

04 Nov 2023  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
29 Jun 2024  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
08 Sep 2024  –  Saturn at opposition
15 Nov 2024  –  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

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme