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°48' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 6 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 become visible at around 19:26 (EST), 64° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:34.

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 -11.6, 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 05h01m40s 19°41'N Taurus -11.6 30'19"3
Saturn 05h01m40s 21°29'N Taurus -0.2 18"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Mar 2032

The sky on 17 March 2032
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
19:01
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:26

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

45%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 12:49 18:57
Venus 06:20 11:47 17:15
Moon 10:49 18:12 01:35
Mars 08:15 14:58 21:41
Jupiter 04:17 09:02 13:47
Saturn 10:46 18:10 01:34
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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18 Oct 2032  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
24 Dec 2032  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Mar 2033  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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