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 20 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:16, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:09, 60° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:46, 53° 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 -12.3, and Saturn at mag -0.1, 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 02h36m10s 20°14'N Aries -12.3 29'54"5
Saturn 02h36m10s 12°32'N Aries -0.1 19"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 123° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2028

The sky on 8 September 2028
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:42
Twilight begins
04:36

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

73%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:39 14:14 19:49
Venus 02:35 09:49 17:03
Moon 20:15 03:28 10:53
Mars 02:26 09:50 17:14
Jupiter 07:40 13:43 19:45
Saturn 21:19 04:09 10:59
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
06 Sep 2029  –  Saturn enters 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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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