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 9°57' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:43 (PDT), 37° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:09.

Mars will be at mag 0.5, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.1, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h55m40s 7°45'S Aquarius 0.5 7"2
1 Ceres 22h55m40s 17°42'S Aquarius 9.1 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 Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Jun 2026

The sky on 29 June 2026
Sunrise
05:40
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56


Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 14:10 21:06
Venus 08:55 15:45 22:36
Moon 19:40 00:21 05:02
Mars 03:14 10:13 17:13
Jupiter 07:25 14:27 21:29
Saturn 01:04 07:15 13:27
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.

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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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