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
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°23' of each other. The Moon will be 21 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 22:44 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 65° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:47.

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 -12.0 in Aries; and Saturn will be at mag -0.1 in Taurus.

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 03h27m10s 21°57'N Aries -12.0 29'37"9
Saturn 03h31m10s 16°38'N Taurus -0.1 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 102° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Aug 2029

The sky on 30 August 2029
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:36

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

56%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:24 14:13 20:03
Venus 09:39 15:18 20:57
Moon 21:45 05:11 12:45
Mars 11:58 16:59 22:01
Jupiter 10:17 15:49 21:22
Saturn 22:44 05:48 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.

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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme