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 39' to the south of Saturn. The Moon will be 7 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 17:05 (EST), 40° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:03.

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 -11.3, and Saturn at mag 1.0, 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 23h30m00s 6°13'S Aquarius -11.3 29'30"1
Saturn 23h30m00s 5°33'S Aquarius 1.0 16"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 67° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Nov 2024

The sky on 26 November 2024
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:06

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

16%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:21 12:45 17:10
Venus 10:11 14:36 19:00
Moon 02:14 08:04 13:43
Mars 20:26 03:53 11:20
Jupiter 16:56 00:27 07:58
Saturn 12:46 18:17 23:48
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.

Related news

23 Nov 2054  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
01 Feb 2055  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
21 Jul 2055  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
29 Sep 2055  –  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.

Share

Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

Color scheme