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°35' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:45 (PDT), 30° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 21:24.

Saturn will be at mag 0.6, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.2, 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 21h57m00s 14°05'S Capricornus 0.6 16"4
1 Ceres 21h57m00s 22°40'S Capricornus 9.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 67° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Mar 2026

The sky on 23 March 2026
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:25


Waxing Crescent

30%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 11:27 17:08
Venus 07:42 14:06 20:29
Moon 09:41 17:12 00:49
Mars 06:12 11:58 17:43
Jupiter 12:41 19:50 03:00
Saturn 07:03 13:05 19:07
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

11 Aug 2052  –  1 Ceres at opposition
08 Nov 2053  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Feb 2055  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Jun 2056  –  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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