Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 39' to the north of Saturn.

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

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 1° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h21m00s 6°45'N Pisces -3.9 11"1
Saturn 01h21m00s 6°06'N Pisces 0.6 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 7 May 2027

The sky on 7 May 2027
Sunrise
05:29
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
03:37


Waxing Crescent

5%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:55 13:19 20:43
Venus 04:35 11:03 17:30
Moon 05:52 13:44 21:45
Mars 12:45 19:42 02:39
Jupiter 11:57 19:03 02:09
Saturn 04:38 11:04 17:29
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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