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°45' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 21 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:15 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 60° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:26.

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 -11.9, and Saturn at mag 0.0, 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 02h36m40s 20°27'N Aries -11.9 30'08"1
Saturn 02h36m40s 12°41'N Aries 0.0 18"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 97° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Aug 2028

The sky on 12 August 2028
Sunrise
05:56
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
04:10

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

51%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:26 14:03 20:41
Venus 02:27 09:45 17:03
Moon 22:27 05:40 13:03
Mars 02:59 10:31 18:03
Jupiter 09:07 15:17 21:28
Saturn 23:15 06:04 12:52
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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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
EST

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