Conjunction of Ceres and Eris

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


1 Ceres and 136199 Eris will share the same right ascension, with 1 Ceres passing 41' to the north of 136199 Eris.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible between 18:27 and 02:05. They will become accessible at around 18:27, when they rise to an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 22:16, 46° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 02:05 when they sink below 21° above your south-western horizon.

1 Ceres will be at mag 7.7, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.7, both in the constellation Cetus.

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 1 Ceres and 136199 Eris 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
1 Ceres 01h42m00s 2°06'S Cetus 7.7 0"0
136199 Eris 01h42m00s 2°48'S Cetus 18.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 152° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Nov 2016

The sky on 9 November 2016
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
16:39
Twilight ends
18:13
Twilight begins
04:57


Waxing Gibbous

77%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:17 12:06 16:55
Venus 09:55 14:21 18:46
Moon 13:58 19:40 01:28
Mars 12:04 16:45 21:27
Jupiter 03:35 09:24 15:13
Saturn 08:47 13:31 18:15
All times shown in EST.

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

15 Oct 2016  –  136199 Eris at opposition
16 Oct 2017  –  136199 Eris at opposition
16 Oct 2018  –  136199 Eris at opposition
17 Oct 2019  –  136199 Eris 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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