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°40' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:23, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:13, 59° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:17, 29° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, 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 02h31m00s 19°42'N Aries -12.5 29'50"7
Saturn 02h31m00s 12°02'N Aries -0.1 19"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 151° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Oct 2028

The sky on 6 October 2028
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
18:16
Twilight ends
19:49
Twilight begins
05:11

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

91%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:05 11:58 17:50
Venus 03:26 10:08 16:49
Moon 18:47 02:13 09:49
Mars 02:05 09:10 16:15
Jupiter 06:21 12:15 18:09
Saturn 19:25 02:13 09:01
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

22 Aug 2028  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
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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