Conjunction of Saturn and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 7°51' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:48 (PDT), 24° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 57 minutes after the Sun at 20:40.

Saturn will be at mag 0.5, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and 1 Ceres 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
Saturn 21h07m50s 17°32'S Capricornus 0.5 16"0
1 Ceres 21h07m50s 25°23'S Capricornus 9.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 57° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Aug 2026

The sky on 11 August 2026
Sunrise
06:08
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:15
Twilight begins
04:35


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:53 18:52
Venus 09:50 15:45 21:41
Moon 04:50 12:06 19:13
Mars 02:19 09:31 16:43
Jupiter 05:22 12:17 19:12
Saturn 22:17 04:28 10:39
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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

24 Jul 1992  –  1 Ceres at opposition
21 Oct 1993  –  1 Ceres at opposition
01 Feb 1995  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 May 1996  –  1 Ceres at opposition

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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