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 52' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:56 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 54° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:34.

Saturn will be at mag -0.1, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

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 06h50m50s 22°10'N Gemini -0.1 17"8
1 Ceres 06h50m50s 23°02'N Gemini 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 70° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Aug 2025

The sky on 17 August 2025
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
19:36
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:41


Waning Crescent

28%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:48 11:40 18:32
Venus 03:29 10:34 17:38
Moon 00:17 07:50 15:28
Mars 09:33 15:30 21:27
Jupiter 03:02 10:11 17:19
Saturn 21:16 03:13 09:11
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

02 Oct 2002  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jan 2004  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 May 2005  –  1 Ceres at opposition
11 Aug 2006  –  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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