Conjunction of Saturn and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 1°17' to the north of Uranus.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:55 (EDT) – 3 hours and 14 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:11.

Saturn will be at mag 0.4, and Uranus at mag 5.7, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and Uranus 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
Saturn 18h00m20s 22°19'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"6
Uranus 18h00m20s 23°37'S Sagittarius 5.7 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Oct 2024

The sky on 10 October 2024
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
19:00
Twilight ends
20:20
Twilight begins
06:03


Waxing Gibbous

58%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:57 13:38 19:19
Venus 10:03 15:20 20:37
Moon 14:36 19:37 00:40
Mars 00:32 07:32 14:32
Jupiter 22:30 05:29 12:28
Saturn 17:25 23:08 04:50
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.

Related news

01 Sep 1987  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
04 Apr 1988  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
20 Jun 1988  –  Uranus at opposition
05 Sep 1988  –  Uranus 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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