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 38' to the north of Saturn. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Los Angeles however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.3, and Saturn at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 23h26m00s 5°01'S Aquarius -9.3 29'58"2
Saturn 23h26m00s 5°39'S Aquarius 1.1 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:02

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

43%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:17 13:06 17:54
Venus 09:50 14:39 19:28
Moon 22:39 05:37 12:27
Mars 21:10 04:14 11:18
Jupiter 17:46 00:53 08:00
Saturn 13:02 18:40 00:19
All times shown in PST.

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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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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