Close approach of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°25' of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:13 (EST), 34° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 41 minutes after the Sun at 21:22.

Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 01h27m30s 10°22'N Pisces -4.2 18"9
Saturn 01h33m40s 7°18'N Pisces 0.4 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Feb 2028

The sky on 28 February 2028
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
17:41
Twilight ends
19:13
Twilight begins
04:55


Waxing Crescent

13%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:21 10:20 15:20
Venus 08:07 14:47 21:27
Moon 07:31 14:11 21:02
Mars 06:45 12:22 18:00
Jupiter 18:46 01:02 07:18
Saturn 08:25 14:54 21:22
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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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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