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 1°05' to the north of Saturn.

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

From Cambridge , 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 04:25 (EDT) – 2 hours and 10 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:02.

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Venus will be at mag -4.1, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h11m20s 20°53'S Sagittarius -4.1 16"7
Saturn 19h11m20s 21°58'S Sagittarius 0.4 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Feb 2019

The sky on 18 February 2019
Sunrise
06:35
Sunset
17:19
Twilight ends
18:54
Twilight begins
05:01

14-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:14 12:53 18:32
Venus 04:21 09:03 13:45
Moon 16:10 23:34 06:47
Mars 08:59 15:51 22:42
Jupiter 02:34 07:09 11:44
Saturn 04:25 09:02 13:40
All times shown in EST.

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

06 Sep 2018  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
29 Apr 2019  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
09 Jul 2019  –  Saturn at opposition
18 Sep 2019  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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