The planets Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 49.3 arcminutes of each other.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:13 (EST) – 3 hours and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.
Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.
They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 | 10h01m00s | 12°30'N | Leo | -4.1 | 15"1 |
| Saturn | 10h02m00s | 13°17'N | Leo | 0.5 | 16"7 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.
The sky on 23 Nov 2024
| The sky on 23 November 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
42% 22 days old |
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
| 12 Apr 2036 | – Saturn ends retrograde motion |
| 12 Dec 2036 | – Saturn enters retrograde motion |
| 17 Feb 2037 | – Saturn at opposition |
| 27 Apr 2037 | – 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.