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 (EST) – 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.
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 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
99% 14 days old |
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.