Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 3°45' to the south of Saturn.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:28 (EDT), 12° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 49 minutes after the Sun at 20:44.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h28m00s 16°04'S Libra -4.1 16"9
Saturn 14h28m00s 12°18'S Libra 0.5 15"7

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

The sky on 6 Jul 2024

The sky on 6 July 2024
Sunrise
05:24
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:33
Twilight begins
03:18


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 14:29 21:47
Venus 06:06 13:34 21:02
Moon 05:36 13:39 21:34
Mars 01:58 09:02 16:07
Jupiter 03:00 10:22 17:45
Saturn 23:35 05:16 10:57
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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10 May 2014  –  Saturn at opposition
20 Jul 2014  –  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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