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
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°06' of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:57 (EDT) – 1 hour and 44 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks around 06:24.

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Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 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 21h34m30s -13°11' Capricornus -4.3 22"3
Saturn 21h36m30s -15°14' Capricornus 0.7 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2022

The sky on 28 March 2022
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
05:07

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:38 12:39 18:40
Venus 04:46 10:02 15:17
Moon 05:14 10:10 15:14
Mars 04:45 09:46 14:47
Jupiter 06:08 11:54 17:40
Saturn 04:57 10:05 15:13
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.

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08 Sep 2024  –  Saturn at opposition

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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