Jupiter and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°11' to the north of Saturn.

From São Paulo , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 10° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:21 (GMT-03) – 1 hour and 18 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the north-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:14.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, and Saturn at mag 0.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Jupiter 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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 18 May 2024

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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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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