The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°13' to the south of Saturn.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:07 (EDT) – 2 hours and 12 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:42.

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Jupiter will be at mag -1.7, and Saturn at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 13h09m40s 6°11'S Virgo -1.7 30"4
Saturn 13h09m40s 4°57'S Virgo 0.7 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2024

The sky on 2 July 2024
Sunrise
05:09
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
02:55

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:39 14:09 21:38
Venus 05:45 13:20 20:55
Moon 01:56 09:40 17:38
Mars 01:54 08:58 16:02
Jupiter 03:00 10:26 17:51
Saturn 23:43 05:23 11:04
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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19 Jun 2041  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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