Conjunction of Mars and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 5°33' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:22 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 38° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:36.

Mars will be at mag 1.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.7, both in the constellation Scorpius.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars 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
Mars 16h20m00s 20°47'S Scorpius 1.0 6"1
1 Ceres 16h20m00s 15°13'S Scorpius 8.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jun 2026

The sky on 12 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
03:53


Waning Crescent

6%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 14:36 21:49
Venus 08:25 15:32 22:40
Moon 03:11 10:21 17:40
Mars 03:41 10:30 17:20
Jupiter 08:15 15:19 22:23
Saturn 02:08 08:18 14:29
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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

31 Jan 2064  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 May 2065  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 Aug 2066  –  1 Ceres at opposition
28 Nov 2067  –  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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