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 3°41' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dusk.

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 -7.9, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 03h36m10s 21°07'N Taurus -7.9 29'23"5
Saturn 03h36m10s 17°25'N Taurus 0.1 16"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 3 May 2030

The sky on 3 May 2030
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
19:51
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
03:58

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:14 11:50 18:26
Venus 04:13 10:13 16:13
Moon 06:11 13:36 21:05
Mars 06:03 13:09 20:16
Jupiter 20:35 01:34 06:33
Saturn 06:35 13:42 20:49
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

18 Jan 2030  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
20 Sep 2030  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 Nov 2030  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Feb 2031  –  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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