Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 41' 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 however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Saturn at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 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 23h15m50s 5°58'S Aquarius -4.0 14"5
Saturn 23h15m50s 6°40'S Aquarius 1.0 15"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Jul 2026

The sky on 18 July 2026
Sunrise
05:51
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:42
Twilight begins
04:10


Waxing Crescent

28%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 12:17 19:09
Venus 09:24 15:51 22:18
Moon 10:40 16:49 22:49
Mars 02:47 09:55 17:02
Jupiter 06:30 13:29 20:29
Saturn 23:51 06:03 12:15
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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