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 a mere 24.1 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 12° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:06 (PDT) – 1 hour and 35 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:08.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

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 01h30m40s 7°27'N Pisces -4.0 13"1
Saturn 01h31m10s 7°05'N Pisces 0.5 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 May 2026

The sky on 4 May 2026
Sunrise
05:57
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:24


Waning Gibbous

86%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:32 12:06 18:39
Venus 07:33 14:44 21:55
Moon 22:03 02:47 07:28
Mars 04:51 11:12 17:33
Jupiter 10:15 17:23 00:31
Saturn 04:31 10:38 16:46
All times shown in PDT.

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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