Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 6°32' to the north 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 9° 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 | 19h30m00s | 15°02'S | Sagittarius | -4.6 | 45"9 |
Saturn | 19h30m00s | 21°34'S | Sagittarius | 0.5 | 15"3 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.
The sky on 1 Sep 2024
The sky on 1 September 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1% 28 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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.