Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°58' to the south of Saturn.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:02 (PDT), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 41 minutes after the Sun at 21:09.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Saturn at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair 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 Venus 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
Venus 12h33m40s 3°10'S Virgo -4.0 13"5
Saturn 12h33m40s 1°12'S Virgo 0.8 15"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Oct 2025

The sky on 18 October 2025
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
18:13
Twilight ends
19:37
Twilight begins
05:33


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:47 13:56 19:06
Venus 05:25 11:25 17:26
Moon 04:25 10:40 16:47
Mars 08:48 14:02 19:16
Jupiter 23:41 06:46 13:50
Saturn 16:57 22:50 04:42
All times shown in PDT.

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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