Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 21' to the south 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 visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:39 (PDT) – 2 hours and 50 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:56.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 14h10m00s 11°03'S Virgo -4.0 13"2
Saturn 14h10m00s 10°41'S Virgo 0.5 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Aug 2026

The sky on 2 August 2026
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:51
Twilight ends
21:27
Twilight begins
04:25


Waning Gibbous

81%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:34 11:35 18:35
Venus 09:42 15:49 21:56
Moon 21:41 03:43 09:53
Mars 02:29 09:40 16:51
Jupiter 05:47 12:44 19:41
Saturn 22:52 05:04 11:16
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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