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

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 share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°50' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 3 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 become visible at around 20:37 (EST), 30° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 29 minutes after the Sun at 23:33.

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 -10.8, and Saturn at mag -0.0, 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 07h16m10s 17°22'N Gemini -10.8 32'10"2
Saturn 07h16m10s 22°13'N Gemini -0.0 17"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 21 May 2034

The sky on 21 May 2034
Sunrise
05:14
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
22:06
Twilight begins
03:12

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

21%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 14:12 21:58
Venus 07:15 15:00 22:45
Moon 08:57 16:15 23:29
Mars 06:57 14:38 22:20
Jupiter 03:02 09:10 15:18
Saturn 08:31 16:02 23:33
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

15 Mar 2034  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
16 Nov 2034  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Jan 2035  –  Saturn at opposition
30 Mar 2035  –  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

Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

Color scheme