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 8°46' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 21:17 (PST), 47° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:13.

Saturn will be at mag 0.7, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.6, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h10m00s 7°37'N Leo 0.7 17"4
1 Ceres 11h10m00s 16°23'N Leo 8.6 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Feb 2026

The sky on 18 February 2026
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
17:38
Twilight ends
19:02
Twilight begins
05:07


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:18 13:10 19:02
Venus 07:07 12:45 18:23
Moon 07:17 13:07 19:06
Mars 06:10 11:29 16:48
Jupiter 13:53 21:02 04:11
Saturn 08:03 14:00 19:58
All times shown in PST.

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

25 Feb 2009  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Jun 2010  –  1 Ceres at opposition
16 Sep 2011  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Dec 2012  –  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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