Conjunction of Neptune and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Neptune and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Neptune passing 2°19' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:49 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 37° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:56.

Neptune will be at mag 7.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Neptune 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
Neptune 04h55m40s 21°07'N Taurus 7.9 2"2
1 Ceres 04h55m40s 18°48'N Taurus 9.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 58° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2026

The sky on 29 March 2026
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:16


Waxing Gibbous

90%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 11:17 16:57
Venus 07:38 14:09 20:41
Moon 16:10 22:50 05:20
Mars 06:01 11:52 17:42
Jupiter 12:19 19:28 02:38
Saturn 06:41 12:44 18:47
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

15 Sep 2057  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Dec 2058  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Apr 2060  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Jul 2061  –  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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