The planets Venus, Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°44' of each other.
From Columbus , the trio will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 21:18 (EDT), 14° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 1 minute after the Sun at 22:39.
Venus will be at mag -4.2; Saturn will be at mag 0.9; and Mars will be at mag 1.5. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.
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 trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| Venus | 12h03m20s | 0°55'S | Virgo | -4.2 | 21"4 |
| Saturn | 12h08m40s | 1°27'N | Virgo | 0.9 | 16"2 |
| Mars | 12h06m20s | 0°12'S | Virgo | 1.5 | 4"6 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.
The sky on 20 Apr 2024
| The sky on 20 April 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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92% 12 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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.