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 27' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 17 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 be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:20, when they reach an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:07, 50° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:41, 25° above your south-western horizon.

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 -12.7, and Saturn at mag 0.6, 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 23h15m30s 6°39'S Aquarius -12.7 33'09"4
Saturn 23h15m30s 7°06'S Aquarius 0.6 19"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 160° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Aug 2024

The sky on 20 August 2024
Sunrise
06:13
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:55
Twilight begins
04:44

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

94%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:06 12:32 18:59
Venus 07:53 14:11 20:28
Moon 19:53 01:25 07:05
Mars 01:02 08:08 15:14
Jupiter 00:52 07:55 14:59
Saturn 20:23 02:07 07:51
All times shown in PDT.

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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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