© NASA/Cassini

Saturn at perihelion

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed

Objects: Saturn
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The sky at

Saturn's 29.5-year orbit around the Sun will carry it to its closest point to the Sun – its perihelion – at a distance of 9.02 AU.

In practice, however, Saturn's orbit is very close to circular; its distance from the Sun only varies by about 11.5% between perihelion and aphelion. This means that the difference in the amount of heat and light it receives from the Sun between aphelion and perihelion is extremely small.

Finding Saturn

Saturn's distance from the Sun doesn't affect its appearance. From San Diego, at the moment of perihelion it will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:17 (PDT), 31° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. It will then reach its highest point in the sky at 21:42, 79° above your southern horizon. It will continue to be observable until around 03:56, when it sinks below 8° above your western horizon.

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

A chart of the path of Saturn across the sky in 2239 can be found here, and a chart of its rising and setting times here.

The position of Saturn at the moment it passes perihelion will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Saturn 05h57m40s 22°28'N Orion -0.4 20.4"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:14

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

81%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 13:50 20:27
Venus 05:59 11:50 17:40
Moon 22:33 03:45 08:52
Mars 05:12 10:47 16:21
Jupiter 08:29 15:14 22:00
Saturn 05:36 11:18 16:59
All times shown in PDT.

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

26 Dec 2238  –  Saturn at opposition
03 Mar 2239  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
04 Nov 2239  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
09 Jan 2240  –  Saturn at opposition

Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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