Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 7°06' to the north of Saturn.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.6, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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

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 19h26m30s 14°35'S Sagittarius -4.6 51"9
Saturn 19h26m30s 21°41'S Sagittarius 0.5 15"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Oct 2024

The sky on 8 October 2024
Sunrise
07:33
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:32
Twilight begins
06:02


Waxing Crescent

37%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:03 13:39 19:16
Venus 10:23 15:24 20:24
Moon 13:27 17:49 22:10
Mars 00:15 07:41 15:08
Jupiter 22:18 05:42 13:07
Saturn 17:47 23:21 04:56
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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23 Sep 1990  –  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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