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
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The sky at

The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°55' of each other. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible between 18:18 and 06:55. They will become accessible at around 18:18, when they rise to an altitude of 9° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:36, 70° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:55 when they sink below 9° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Saturn will be at mag -0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h11m50s 16°21'N Cancer -12.8 32'39"6
Saturn 08h14m20s 20°14'N Cancer -0.3 20"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 176° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jan 2035

The sky on 23 January 2035
Sunrise
07:45
Sunset
17:38
Twilight ends
19:13
Twilight begins
06:10

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 13:01 18:11
Venus 04:35 09:27 14:19
Moon 16:41 00:02 07:18
Mars 03:56 08:44 13:31
Jupiter 10:42 16:52 23:03
Saturn 17:21 00:36 07:52
All times shown in EST.

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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30 Nov 2035  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
04 Feb 2036  –  Saturn at opposition

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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39.96°N
83.00°W
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