Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 33' to the south of Saturn.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:44 (EDT) – 1 hour and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:52.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair 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.

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 11h55m50s 2°03'N Virgo -3.9 10"8
Saturn 11h55m50s 2°37'N Virgo 1.0 16"0

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

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
20:31
Twilight ends
22:07
Twilight begins
04:52


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:14 15:05 21:55
Venus 07:10 14:09 21:07
Moon 07:51 15:06 22:14
Mars 02:51 09:35 16:19
Jupiter 03:58 10:53 17:48
Saturn 23:57 05:46 11:34
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

04 Sep 2009  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
13 Jan 2010  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Mar 2010  –  Saturn at opposition
30 May 2010  –  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