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 7°02' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:50, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:31, 28° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:55, 25° above your southern horizon.

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 -12.3 in the constellation Scorpius, and Saturn at mag 0.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Ophiuchus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 16h38m30s 27°12'S Scorpius -12.3 30'22"8
Saturn 16h38m30s 20°09'S Ophiuchus 0.1 17"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 124° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jul 2024

The sky on 28 July 2024
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:13
Twilight ends
22:07
Twilight begins
03:47

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

40%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:01 14:36 21:10
Venus 06:57 13:59 21:00
Moon 23:40 06:52 14:18
Mars 01:19 08:39 15:58
Jupiter 01:49 09:14 16:39
Saturn 22:07 03:47 09:28
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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01 Apr 2046  –  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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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