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 18' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 14 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 between 19:44 and 04:44. They will become accessible at around 19:44, when they rise to an altitude of 11° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:14, 40° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 04:44 when they sink below 11° above your 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 -12.8, 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 23h08m00s 7°38'S Aquarius -12.8 33'18"7
Saturn 23h08m00s 7°56'S Aquarius 0.6 19"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 170° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Sep 2024

The sky on 17 September 2024
Sunrise
06:33
Sunset
18:58
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
04:59

14-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 12:07 18:38
Venus 08:57 14:30 20:02
Moon 18:27 00:00 05:44
Mars 00:04 07:36 15:09
Jupiter 22:55 06:23 13:51
Saturn 18:39 00:14 05:49
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

08 Sep 2024  –  Saturn at opposition
15 Nov 2024  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
23 Mar 2025  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
06 May 2025  –  Equinox on Saturn

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