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 6°24' to the south 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 dawn.

Neptune will be at mag 8.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.7, both in the constellation Leo.

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 09h57m30s 12°54'N Leo 8.0 2"2
1 Ceres 09h57m30s 19°18'N Leo 8.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2026

The sky on 10 May 2026
Sunrise
05:52
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:18
Twilight begins
04:16


Waning Crescent

35%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:42 12:29 19:16
Venus 07:37 14:52 22:06
Moon 02:13 07:40 13:14
Mars 04:40 11:06 17:31
Jupiter 09:56 17:03 00:11
Saturn 04:09 10:17 16:25
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

28 Nov 2090  –  1 Ceres at opposition
21 Mar 2092  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jul 2093  –  1 Ceres at opposition
03 Oct 2094  –  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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