Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 16' to the north of Saturn.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

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 -4.0, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 01h50m30s 9°11'N Pisces -4.0 14"4
Saturn 01h50m30s 8°55'N Pisces 0.4 16"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:27


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:42 11:35 18:28
Venus 08:11 14:13 20:14
Moon 04:22 11:47 18:59
Mars 00:13 07:49 15:26
Jupiter 23:40 07:11 14:42
Saturn 19:37 01:13 06:49
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 Oct 1998  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Dec 1998  –  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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