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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:28 (EDT) – 2 hours and 45 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:39.

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 5 Apr 2025

The sky on 5 April 2025
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:52
Twilight begins
04:39


Waxing Gibbous

64%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 11:34 17:34
Venus 05:03 11:20 17:38
Moon 11:47 19:46 03:33
Mars 11:57 19:35 03:13
Jupiter 09:15 16:47 00:19
Saturn 05:42 11:31 17:20
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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