See the moon and Saturn meet in the night sky early on May 31

If you have a telescope, you might want to consider setting your alarm for Friday (May 31) around 4 a.m. local time (3 a.m. if you live in Hawaii, Arizona, or Puerto Rico that don’t observe daylight savings time). At that hour, if you go outside and look east-southeast, you’ll see what are probably the two most popular celestial objects to see through a telescope: MONDAY and the planet Saturn.

The Moon will be just over half a day after it officially reaches its last quarter, or semi-the phase of the moon. Some may wonder why we call the moon at this particular phase a “quarter moon,” since it is abundantly clear that what we see in the sky is a half-illuminated moon. But the “quarter” does not refer to what we see in the sky, but rather that the moon is beginning its last quarter in its 29.53-day cycle, known as a synodic month.

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