Here is the pre-dawn sky of Friday, March 1.
The Moon will pass closest north of Saturn around 19h Universal Time, which is 1 PM in North America’s Central time zone – in the middle of the day. So our morning twilight picture is about 7 hours before this closest moment.
During the conjunction, the Moon will cover – “occult” – the planet, as seen from farther south and west. It will happen by daylight, hence not really observable, in the middle Americas and across the Pacific, and in morning twilight for some islands of the western Paciic.
In this diagram, blue circles on the Earth are the foorprints of Saturn’s “shadow” cast by the Moon, at mid occultation (given in UT to the nearest hour) and an hour before and after, though they are inexact, because of the Earth’s rotation during the event. The side-diagram shows the phase of the Moon, with Saturn passing behind it at 10-minute intervals.
Saturn gets occulted by the Moon 13 times this year – twice in May and November, but not in December. The series of occultations is happening because Saturn is lying in a part of its orbit only just north of the ecliptic, and the Moon’s orbit is presently oriented so that it keeps gliding down across this region. The Moon is at its descending node on May 2 at 11h U.T. The sky diagram may make it seem that the Moon descends across the ecliptic earlier than that. But, in that diagram, the Moon images are at their positions as seen from our northern latitude – displaced southward by parallax. The arrows from one day to the next are at the height where the Moon would be as seen from the center of the Earth.
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DIAGRAMS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). I am grateful to know of what methods work for you.