How to watch the conjunction of Venus and Saturn online today

By Georgina Torbet January 22, 2023

With temperatures dropping and winter well set in over much of the Northern Hemisphere, we wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t fancy sitting outside for an evening of stargazing. However, it would be a shame to miss astronomical events like the close conjunction of Venus and Saturn in the sky tonight.

Contents

What to expect from the conjunction
How to watch the conjunction online

Venus meets Saturn: a planetary conjunction – live event (22 Jan. 2023)

Fortunately, there’s an online livestream of the event so you can enjoy the sights while staying snug and warm at home. We’ve got the details on how to watch below.

What to expect from the conjunction

The planet Venus. — The planet Venus NASA

A conjunction is when two or more bodies appear close to each other in the sky, and tonight, Sunday January 22, there will be a conjunction between Venus and Saturn. As space.com points out, because Venus is much closer to us and to the sun than Saturn is, it will appear much brighter. But with a telescope, it will be possible to see Saturn as well, even though it will be 100 times fainter than Venus.

cassini images — NASA/JPL

The two planets will be close to each other in the night sky for several days, but they will reach their closest proximity tonight. If you do fancy braving the cold to appreciate the view, then Sky and Telescope advises using binoculars or a telescope and looking during twilight, when the two planets should be visible above the thin crescent of the moon.

To see when the conjunction will be visible from your time zone, you can use the online tool at In The Sky.

How to watch the conjunction online

To watch the conjunction from the warmth of home, you can tune in to the livestream provided by the Virtual Telescope Project. This project uses data from robotic telescopes that is streamed for free to the public to allow a broader range of people to enjoy views of the night sky.

The stream of the conjunction begins at 1:30 p.m. ET (10:30 a.m. PT) on Sunday, January 22. You can watch the stream either by heading to the project’s YouTube channel or by using the video embedded near the top of this page.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

Space

Here’s why scientists think life may have thrived on the ‘hell planet’ Venus

The planet Venus.

When you look at Venus today, it doesn’t seem like a very welcoming place. With surface temperatures hotter than an oven, atmospheric pressure equivalent to being 3,000 feet deep in the ocean, and no liquid water anywhere that we’ve seen, it seems like the opposite of a comfortable environment in which life could emerge.

But in the last decade, scientists have begun to wonder whether this “hell planet” could once have been habitable. Billions of years ago, Venus could have been a cooler, wetter place, with oceans not unlike our own here on Earth.

Space

Inside the crazy plan to scoop up and bring home a bit of the Venus atmosphere

Rendering of a heat shield deploying over Venus.

If you’ve been following space news recently, you’ve probably heard about Mars Sample Return — NASA’s ambitious plan to collect samples of Martian rocks and bring them back to Earth for study. That mission is scheduled to launch later this decade, but it will be a years-long and extremely expensive process to collect and retrieve those samples.

But Mars isn’t the only planet within visiting distance. Why don’t we hop over to our other planetary neighbor, Venus, and collect a sample from there as well?

Space

Watch SpaceX achieve record 16th launch of first-stage Falcon 9 booster

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) spacecraft onboard from Launch Complex 39A, Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The IXPE spacecraft is the first satellite dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from a variety of cosmic sources, such as black holes and neutron stars. Launch occurred at 1 a.m. EST.

SpaceX has successfully launched a Falcon 9 booster for a record 16th time, highlighting once again the company’s ability to reuse the first-stage booster for multiple space missions.

The Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 11:58 p.m. ET on Sunday, carrying with it 22 next-generation satellites for SpaceX's internet-from-space service, called Starlink.