Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 57' 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 visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:40 (EDT) – 2 hours and 45 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:52.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and Saturn at mag -0.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 04h48m30s 21°46'N Taurus -2.1 33"3
Saturn 04h48m30s 20°48'N Taurus -0.0 16"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 6 May 2024

The sky on 6 May 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
03:52


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 11:12 17:34
Venus 05:28 12:18 19:09
Moon 04:41 11:27 18:28
Mars 04:06 10:11 16:16
Jupiter 06:14 13:24 20:35
Saturn 03:28 09:07 14:46
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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