Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°07' to the south of Saturn.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 17h20m20s 24°05'S Ophiuchus -3.9 10"9
Saturn 17h20m20s 21°57'S Ophiuchus 0.4 15"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2024

The sky on 11 October 2024
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
18:08
Twilight ends
19:41
Twilight begins
05:16


Waxing Gibbous

69%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:32 12:58 18:25
Venus 09:49 14:39 19:29
Moon 15:17 19:49 00:27
Mars 23:15 06:48 14:22
Jupiter 21:11 04:43 12:15
Saturn 16:50 22:21 03:53
All times shown in EDT.

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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30 Aug 1988  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

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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