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°02' 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 become visible at around 20:53 (EDT), 20° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 33 minutes after the Sun at 22:52.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Saturn at mag 0.0, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h22m10s 24°06'N Gemini -4.0 13"6
Saturn 07h22m10s 22°03'N Gemini 0.0 16"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jun 2034

The sky on 3 June 2034
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:19
Twilight ends
22:24
Twilight begins
03:14


Waning Gibbous

95%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:22 13:52 21:23
Venus 07:49 15:25 23:01
Moon 20:38 01:41 06:44
Mars 06:56 14:33 22:10
Jupiter 02:25 08:36 14:46
Saturn 07:59 15:26 22:52
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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