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°48' to the south 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 become visible at around 16:49 (EST), 13° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 14 minutes after the Sun at 18:25.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Saturn at mag 0.5, 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 19h21m10s 23°51'S Sagittarius -4.0 12"0
Saturn 19h21m10s 22°02'S Sagittarius 0.5 15"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Dec 2019

The sky on 10 December 2019
Sunrise
07:00
Sunset
16:11
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:18

14-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:38 10:27 15:15
Venus 09:18 13:46 18:14
Moon 15:26 22:42 06:07
Mars 04:09 09:14 14:19
Jupiter 08:03 12:34 17:05
Saturn 09:11 13:48 18:25
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

18 Sep 2019  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 May 2020  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
20 Jul 2020  –  Saturn at opposition
29 Sep 2020  –  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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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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