The Moon and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 4°04' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.
The Moon will be at mag -11.0; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.
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.
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 coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.
|The sky on 07 December 2021|
3 days old
All times shown in EST.
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.
|02 Aug 2021||– Saturn at opposition|
|14 Aug 2022||– Saturn at opposition|
|27 Aug 2023||– Saturn at opposition|
|08 Sep 2024||– Saturn at opposition|
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.