Close approach of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 43.4 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:53 (PDT) – 2 hours and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:22.

Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Saturn will be at mag -0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

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

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 04h37m20s 19°38'N Taurus -4.1 16"8
Saturn 04h36m40s 20°21'N Taurus -0.0 16"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Aug 2025

The sky on 12 August 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:14
Twilight begins
04:36


Waning Gibbous

77%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:59 11:48 18:38
Venus 03:22 10:28 17:34
Moon 21:19 03:24 09:38
Mars 09:38 15:38 21:38
Jupiter 03:17 10:26 17:35
Saturn 21:36 03:34 09:32
All times shown in PDT.

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

24 Jan 2001  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
26 Sep 2001  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
03 Dec 2001  –  Saturn at opposition
07 Feb 2002  –  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.

Share