Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°24' to the north of Saturn.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 20:35 (EDT), 19° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 3 minutes after the Sun at 22:12.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 04h52m20s 23°35'N Taurus -3.9 11"5
Saturn 04h52m20s 21°10'N Taurus -0.0 16"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Sep 2024

The sky on 30 September 2024
Sunrise
07:17
Sunset
19:12
Twilight ends
20:32
Twilight begins
05:57


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:17 13:16 19:14
Venus 09:44 15:12 20:39
Moon 05:20 11:53 18:19
Mars 00:49 07:50 14:51
Jupiter 23:09 06:08 13:07
Saturn 18:06 23:49 05:32
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

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11 Oct 2002  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
17 Dec 2002  –  Saturn at opposition
22 Feb 2003  –  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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