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°09' to the north of Saturn.

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

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Saturn at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h36m40s 13°03'S Capricornus -4.3 22"2
Saturn 21h36m40s 15°13'S Capricornus 0.7 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2022

The sky on 29 March 2022
Sunrise
06:39
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:48
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:38 12:42 18:46
Venus 04:45 10:02 15:18
Moon 05:46 11:02 16:27
Mars 04:43 09:45 14:47
Jupiter 06:04 11:51 17:37
Saturn 04:53 10:02 15:10
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

10 Oct 2021  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
04 Jun 2022  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
14 Aug 2022  –  Saturn at opposition
22 Oct 2022  –  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