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 2°49' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:01 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 40° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:29.

Saturn will be at mag 0.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 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 07h52m00s 20°50'N Gemini 0.0 17"3
1 Ceres 07h52m00s 23°39'N Gemini 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2026

The sky on 4 April 2026
Sunrise
06:33
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:40
Twilight begins
05:07


Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 11:14 16:58
Venus 07:34 14:14 20:53
Moon 21:14 02:27 07:34
Mars 05:50 11:45 17:41
Jupiter 11:57 19:06 02:16
Saturn 06:20 12:23 18:27
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

21 Oct 2062  –  1 Ceres at opposition
31 Jan 2064  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 May 2065  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 Aug 2066  –  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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