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°52' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 20 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:33, when they reach an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:04, 69° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:38, 61° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.2, and Saturn at mag -0.3, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h28m50s 18°23'N Gemini -12.2 30'30"5
Saturn 06h28m50s 22°15'N Gemini -0.3 19"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 113° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Oct 2032

The sky on 23 October 2032
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
17:48
Twilight ends
19:23
Twilight begins
05:29

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

65%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:21 13:59 18:37
Venus 10:21 14:53 19:26
Moon 21:04 04:28 11:50
Mars 04:06 10:19 16:33
Jupiter 13:38 18:16 22:53
Saturn 21:32 05:04 12:35
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

18 Oct 2032  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
24 Dec 2032  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Mar 2033  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
02 Nov 2033  –  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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42.38°N
71.11°W
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