Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°18' 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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h57m40s 22°14'N Gemini -3.9 10"8
Saturn 07h57m40s 20°56'N Gemini 0.1 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jul 2024

The sky on 16 July 2024
Sunrise
05:19
Sunset
20:18
Twilight ends
22:24
Twilight begins
03:13


Waxing Gibbous

83%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:36 14:35 21:34
Venus 06:16 13:38 20:59
Moon 16:09 20:47 01:19
Mars 01:28 08:43 15:58
Jupiter 02:16 09:43 17:11
Saturn 22:47 04:27 10:07
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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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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