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 8°01' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:14 (EDT), 33° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 21:19.

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 -10.6, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 01h34m00s 15°21'N Pisces -10.6 29'59"0
Saturn 01h34m00s 7°20'N Pisces 0.4 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 47° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Feb 2028

The sky on 29 February 2028
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
17:42
Twilight ends
19:14
Twilight begins
04:54

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

19%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:20 10:21 15:21
Venus 08:06 14:47 21:29
Moon 07:49 14:55 22:11
Mars 06:42 12:21 18:00
Jupiter 18:41 00:58 07:14
Saturn 08:21 14:50 21:19
All times shown in EST.

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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22 Aug 2028  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
30 Oct 2028  –  Saturn at opposition
05 Jan 2029  –  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.

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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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