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

Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°36' to the south of Saturn.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Saturn at mag 0.5, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 14h54m00s 17°03'S Libra -3.9 12"0
Saturn 14h54m00s 14°27'S Libra 0.5 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 3 May 2024

The sky on 3 May 2024
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:13
Twilight begins
04:42

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

16%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 11:55 18:13
Venus 06:11 12:55 19:39
Moon 04:06 09:37 15:20
Mars 04:51 10:53 16:55
Jupiter 07:05 14:12 21:19
Saturn 04:17 09:57 15:36
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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07 Mar 1985  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
15 May 1985  –  Saturn at opposition
25 Jul 1985  –  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.

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Columbus

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

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