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°22' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 17 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:59, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:05, 64° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:47, 24° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Saturn at mag -0.3, 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 03h23m40s 21°25'N Aries -12.5 29'26"2
Saturn 03h23m40s 16°02'N Aries -0.3 20"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 156° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Oct 2029

The sky on 24 October 2029
Sunrise
07:12
Sunset
17:58
Twilight ends
19:30
Twilight begins
05:39

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

93%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:51 12:21 17:51
Venus 11:24 15:45 20:06
Moon 18:27 01:50 09:20
Mars 11:33 16:03 20:33
Jupiter 07:37 12:55 18:13
Saturn 19:03 02:05 09:06
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

06 Sep 2029  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
13 Nov 2029  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Jan 2030  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
20 Sep 2030  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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