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 7°42' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:42 (EDT) – 2 hours and 35 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:39.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Saturn at mag 0.3, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h23m30s 19°32'N Aries -10.6 30'31"7
Saturn 02h23m30s 11°49'N Aries 0.3 16"8

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

The sky on 18 Jun 2028

The sky on 18 June 2028
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:08

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

12%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:24 11:31 18:38
Venus 04:00 11:10 18:19
Moon 01:52 09:08 16:34
Mars 04:01 11:25 18:50
Jupiter 12:01 18:23 00:46
Saturn 02:42 09:27 16:12
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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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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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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