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 3°48' to the north of Saturn.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:15 (EST), 32° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 32 minutes after the Sun at 21:15.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h34m20s 11°10'N Pisces -4.2 19"2
Saturn 01h34m20s 7°22'N Pisces 0.4 16"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Mar 2028

The sky on 1 March 2028
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
17:43
Twilight ends
19:15
Twilight begins
04:52

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

26%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:20 10:21 15:23
Venus 08:04 14:47 21:30
Moon 08:22 15:41 23:10
Mars 06:40 12:20 18:00
Jupiter 18:36 00:53 07:10
Saturn 08:17 14:46 21:16
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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30 Oct 2028  –  Saturn at opposition
05 Jan 2029  –  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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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