Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 19' 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 , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 11° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:32 (EST) – 1 hour and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 11° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:44.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 04h03m20s 19°10'N Taurus -3.9 12"0
Saturn 04h03m20s 18°51'N Taurus 0.0 16"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Jun 2030

The sky on 24 June 2030
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:09


Waning Crescent

23%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:17 12:55 20:33
Venus 03:29 10:43 17:56
Moon 01:10 07:59 14:57
Mars 04:44 12:18 19:53
Jupiter 16:38 21:43 02:47
Saturn 03:32 10:45 17:57
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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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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