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°52' of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 21:06 (EST), 49° above your 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 -11.5; and Saturn will be at mag 0.0. 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 08h05m00s 16°53'N Cancer -11.5 32'20"1
Saturn 08h07m20s 20°43'N Cancer 0.0 17"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 12 May 2035

The sky on 12 May 2035
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
20:36
Twilight ends
22:25
Twilight begins
04:28

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

37%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:03 14:31 21:59
Venus 05:21 11:55 18:29
Moon 11:13 18:24 01:30
Mars 02:34 07:37 12:41
Jupiter 05:31 12:13 18:55
Saturn 10:59 18:17 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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30 Nov 2035  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
04 Feb 2036  –  Saturn at opposition
12 Apr 2036  –  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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Columbus

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Longitude:
Timezone:

39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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