The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 4°49' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:06 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 71° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:13.

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 -11.9; and Saturn will be at mag -0.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 07h25m50s 16°40'N Gemini -11.9 30'55"0
Saturn 07h28m30s 21°27'N Gemini -0.2 18"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 90° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Oct 2033

The sky on 14 October 2033
Sunrise
07:38
Sunset
18:53
Twilight ends
20:23
Twilight begins
06:08

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

45%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:41 14:37 19:33
Venus 05:58 12:04 18:10
Moon 23:28 06:47 14:04
Mars 15:18 19:57 00:35
Jupiter 16:39 21:55 03:11
Saturn 00:06 07:27 14:47
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

01 Mar 2033  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
02 Nov 2033  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
07 Jan 2034  –  Saturn at opposition
15 Mar 2034  –  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.

Share

Columbus

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

Color scheme