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 5°50' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 25 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:28 (EDT) – 3 hours and 20 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 31° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:15.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7, 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 03h18m40s 21°53'N Aries -10.7 29'49"3
Saturn 03h18m40s 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 52° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2029

The sky on 7 July 2029
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
20:37
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:50

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

15%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:33 13:02 20:30
Venus 08:02 15:09 22:15
Moon 02:11 09:43 17:20
Mars 13:05 18:51 00:37
Jupiter 13:29 19:13 00:57
Saturn 02:28 09:25 16:22
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

05 Jan 2029  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme