The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The planets Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 13.8 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 9° above the horizon at dawn.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.9; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Jupiter 19h51m00s 21°10'S Sagittarius -1.9 32"4
Saturn 19h50m50s 20°56'S Sagittarius 0.5 15"3

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

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:38
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:49
Twilight begins
05:04

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

82%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:05 13:55 20:44
Venus 06:07 11:54 17:41
Moon 22:53 03:44 08:28
Mars 05:27 10:51 16:16
Jupiter 08:18 15:19 22:20
Saturn 05:48 11:22 16:56
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.

Related news

15 Sep 1960  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
09 May 1961  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
19 Jul 1961  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Sep 1961  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme