By Candace Andrews | 2023-01-21
![Community photo entitled by John Ashley on 01/21/2023 at Sonoita, Arizona, USA](https://earthsky.org/upl/gravity_forms/6-d184048789a60d766a02a8e43117298b/2023/01/Venus-Saturn-2.jpg)
On 01/21/2023 06:30 pm by John Ashley| Sonoita, Arizona, USA
Saturday evening (Jan 21st) after sunset, Venus (left) and Saturn (right) settled towards the western horizon just one degree apart. Sunday evening (Jan 22nd) will be even better, with the two planets side-by-side just 0.4 degrees apart (loosely qualifying as an astronomical conjunction), visible for about one hour following sunset. (For scale, the full moon is about 0.5 degrees wide.) Get outside Sunday after sunset and look westward!
Photographed here every 10 seconds above the old Aeromotor windmill at the Empire Ranch (empireranchfoundation.org), now under BLM stewardship as part of the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area.
Nikon Z9, 100-400mm lens at 250mm, each frame 1/30th sec at f14 and 1,600 ISO. Interval photos recorded every 10 seconds from 06:28 to about 07:00 pm.
Individual frames stacked and edited in Photoshop.