Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°44' to the north of Saturn.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 15° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:59 (PDT) – 1 hour and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

Venus will be at mag -4.4 in the constellation Pisces, and Saturn at mag 1.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

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 23h40m30s 2°28'S Pisces -4.4 25"3
Saturn 23h40m30s 4°12'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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