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

Close approach of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 1°00' of each other.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 17:49 (EDT), 25° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 34 minutes after the Sun at 20:45.

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

Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They 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.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Venus 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
Venus 21h14m10s 18°07'S Capricornus -4.2 18"6
Saturn 21h12m50s 17°10'S Capricornus 0.6 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
20:35
Twilight ends
22:23
Twilight begins
04:31

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:11 18:46
Venus 04:30 10:40 16:50
Moon 18:02 --:-- 04:59
Mars 11:54 19:07 02:19
Jupiter 08:19 15:46 23:13
Saturn 04:20 10:14 16:09
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 Oct 1992  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 Jun 1993  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 1993  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Oct 1993  –  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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39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

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