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 1°05' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 22 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:27 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 64° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:48.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Saturn at mag -0.2, 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 05h25m20s 20°34'N Taurus -11.7 29'43"0
Saturn 05h25m20s 21°40'N Taurus -0.2 18"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Sep 2031

The sky on 9 September 2031
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:04
Twilight ends
20:42
Twilight begins
04:36

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

40%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:07 11:54 18:41
Venus 03:29 10:16 17:04
Moon 23:33 07:08 14:42
Mars 13:27 17:56 22:25
Jupiter 14:10 18:44 23:17
Saturn 23:28 06:56 14:25
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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01 Feb 2031  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
05 Oct 2031  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
11 Dec 2031  –  Saturn at opposition
16 Feb 2032  –  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
EDT

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