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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:13 (EST) – 2 hours and 35 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:11.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Saturn at mag 0.5, 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 14h17m50s 11°57'S Virgo -4.0 11"9
Saturn 14h17m50s 11°23'S Virgo 0.5 15"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2024

The sky on 28 November 2024
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:08


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 12:35 17:02
Venus 10:12 14:38 19:04
Moon 04:19 09:25 14:23
Mars 20:20 03:46 11:13
Jupiter 16:47 00:18 07:49
Saturn 12:38 18:09 23:40
All times shown in EST.

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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18 Feb 2013  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
28 Apr 2013  –  Saturn at opposition
08 Jul 2013  –  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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