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
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 Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 30.9 arcminutes of each other.

From Ashburn , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:25 (EDT) – 1 hour and 51 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:38.

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 -3.9; and Saturn will be at mag 1.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 11h55m00s 2°09'N Virgo -3.9 10"8
Saturn 11h55m50s 2°37'N Virgo 1.0 16"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
05:25

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

80%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 14:12 20:58
Venus 06:23 12:11 17:59
Moon 23:04 04:01 08:52
Mars 05:41 11:08 16:35
Jupiter 08:39 15:36 22:33
Saturn 06:03 11:39 17:15
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

04 Sep 2009  –  Saturn ring plane crossing
13 Jan 2010  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Mar 2010  –  Saturn at opposition
30 May 2010  –  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

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme