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 1°32' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 16° above the horizon at dusk.

Saturn will be at mag 0.4 in the constellation Libra, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Scorpius.

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 16h01m50s 18°55'S Libra 0.4 15"6
1 Ceres 16h01m50s 20°27'S Scorpius 9.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Apr 2026

The sky on 27 April 2026
Sunrise
06:04
Sunset
19:32
Twilight ends
21:03
Twilight begins
04:33


Waxing Gibbous

89%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:27 11:45 18:03
Venus 07:30 14:36 21:41
Moon 16:07 22:15 04:15
Mars 05:05 11:20 17:35
Jupiter 10:38 17:46 00:55
Saturn 04:57 11:03 17:09
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

08 May 2074  –  1 Ceres at opposition
12 Aug 2075  –  1 Ceres at opposition
08 Nov 2076  –  1 Ceres at opposition
25 Feb 2078  –  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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