The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°43' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:59 (EST) – 3 hours and 12 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 27° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:35.

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 -10.8; and Saturn will be at mag 0.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 03h13m50s 21°40'N Aries -10.8 29'48"2
Saturn 03h18m30s 16°03'N Aries 0.1 17"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2029

The sky on 6 July 2029
Sunrise
05:11
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
02:59

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

16%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 12:30 20:10
Venus 07:26 14:42 21:59
Moon 01:06 08:28 15:59
Mars 12:43 18:28 00:13
Jupiter 13:09 18:51 00:33
Saturn 01:59 09:03 16:07
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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06 Sep 2029  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
13 Nov 2029  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Jan 2030  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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