Conjunction of Saturn and Eris

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and 136199 Eris will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 1°17' to the north of 136199 Eris.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:43, when they reach an altitude of 21° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:19, 64° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:53, 22° above your western horizon.

Saturn will be at mag -0.1, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.4, both in the constellation 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 Saturn 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
Saturn 02h05m00s 9°44'N Pisces -0.1 20"0
136199 Eris 02h05m00s 8°27'N Pisces 18.4 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 169° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2026

The sky on 28 March 2026
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
19:09
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:18


Waxing Gibbous

82%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 11:18 16:58
Venus 07:39 14:09 20:39
Moon 15:05 22:03 04:51
Mars 06:03 11:53 17:42
Jupiter 12:22 19:32 02:41
Saturn 06:45 12:48 18:50
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

24 Oct 2056  –  136199 Eris at opposition
25 Oct 2057  –  136199 Eris at opposition
25 Oct 2058  –  136199 Eris at opposition
26 Oct 2059  –  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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