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 1°39' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:03 (PDT) – 1 hour and 54 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:18.

Venus will be at mag -4.4 in Pisces; and Saturn will be at mag 1.1 in Aquarius.

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 23h38m20s 2°38'S Pisces -4.4 25"5
Saturn 23h40m20s 4°13'S Aquarius 1.1 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2026

The sky on 30 June 2026
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:10 14:05 21:01
Venus 08:56 15:46 22:36
Moon 20:28 01:12 05:58
Mars 03:12 10:12 17:13
Jupiter 07:22 14:24 21:26
Saturn 01:00 07:12 13:23
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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