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 2°31' 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 become visible at around 17:24 (EST), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 47 minutes after the Sun at 20:29.

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Venus will be at mag -4.5, and Saturn at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h10m50s 4°50'S Aquarius -4.5 27"4
Saturn 23h10m50s 7°22'S Aquarius 1.0 16"1

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

The sky on 20 Jan 2025

The sky on 20 January 2025
Sunrise
07:06
Sunset
16:42
Twilight ends
18:21
Twilight begins
05:27

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

60%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:31 11:01 15:31
Venus 09:08 14:55 20:41
Moon 22:51 04:35 10:09
Mars 15:41 23:28 07:15
Jupiter 12:52 20:21 03:49
Saturn 09:17 14:53 20:29
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.

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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.

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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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