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 2°37' to the south of 136199 Eris.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:03 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 29° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 03:49.

1 Ceres will be at mag 9.0 in the constellation Cetus, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.6 in the neighbouring constellation of Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 01h56m40s 0°59'N Cetus 9.0 0"0
136199 Eris 01h56m40s 3°37'N Pisces 18.6 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 81° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 6 May 2025

The sky on 6 May 2025
Sunrise
05:30
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:42
Twilight begins
03:38


Waxing Gibbous

78%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:48 11:16 17:43
Venus 03:48 09:57 16:06
Moon 14:09 20:48 03:14
Mars 11:05 18:27 01:49
Jupiter 07:36 15:10 22:45
Saturn 03:48 09:41 15:35
All times shown in EDT.

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

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21 Oct 2039  –  136199 Eris at opposition
21 Oct 2040  –  136199 Eris at opposition
21 Oct 2041  –  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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