Venus-Saturn Conjunction: This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eicher

On Jan. 22, 2023, Venus and Saturn will sit less than one degree apart, making for a captivating cosmic sight.
By | Published: January 16, 2023 | Last updated on May 18, 2023

Hi folks, tune in every week of 2023 for the best in astronomy from Astronomy Editor Dave Eicher, brought to you by Celestron. Dave’s weekly video series will cover all the latest sky events, scientific results, overviews of cosmic mysteries, and more!

This week, prepare for an exciting observing event that will take place in the early evening on Jan. 22, 2023: Dazzlingly bright Venus and distant Saturn will sit less than a degree apart. That’s so close you’ll be able to see both planets sharing the same low-power telescopic field!

Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Dave Eicher, Editor of Astronomy magazine and welcome to This Week in Astronomy, brought to you by Celestron, the world’s leading manufacturer of telescopes.

This week is really exciting because we have a cool sky event happening on January 22, the early evening sky.

If you have a clear sky, go out on that night, look low in the west, and you’ll see Venus — dazzling bright Venus down relatively close to the horizon.

If you look closely, you might see that Saturn is also right next to it, [less than] 1 degree apart. And they’re so close that you can see the two of them together in the same low-power telescope field. This is what astronomers call a conjunction of planets.

VenusSaturnconjunctionmap
On Jan. 22, Venus and Saturn sit 21″ apart. The planets’ sizes are shown here relative to each other but do not represent their brightness compared to the background stars.
Astronomy: Roen Kelly

And we also have the Moon, which is a few degrees below the pair of planets. So all three of those bodies are lined up as we see them. 

So this is really an exercise in depth perception, because we have the Moon a quarter-million miles away; Venus is 149 million miles away; and we have Saturn almost a billion miles away.

You can see them all together at this incredible event, which I hope you’ll enjoy.

Also check out these videos on Astronomy.com, our website; on Celestron’s website; and on all our social media channels.

And subscribe to Astronomy magazine. It’ll give you the perfect guide on how to use your Celestron telescope.

Enjoy the event, and I’ll see you next week!

[End of transcript.]

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