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 a mere 20.8 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:04 (EST) – 2 hours and 53 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:27.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Saturn will be at mag 0.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 07h07m00s 21°43'N Gemini -4.0 13"2
Saturn 07h07m10s 22°04'N Gemini 0.0 16"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Aug 2033

The sky on 13 August 2033
Sunrise
05:57
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
04:11

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

86%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:18 12:29 19:39
Venus 03:07 10:32 17:56
Moon 21:02 03:05 09:16
Mars 17:11 21:23 01:35
Jupiter 20:25 01:48 07:10
Saturn 03:04 10:31 17:57
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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15 Mar 2034  –  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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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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