Conjunction of Jupiter and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 2°34' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:09 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 37° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:22.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 07h49m30s 21°10'N Gemini -2.0 33"3
1 Ceres 07h49m30s 23°45'N Gemini 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 51° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jul 2026

The sky on 11 July 2026
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
04:04


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 13:01 19:52
Venus 09:14 15:50 22:26
Moon 02:35 10:08 17:45
Mars 02:56 10:02 17:07
Jupiter 06:50 13:51 20:51
Saturn 00:18 06:30 12:42
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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01 Sep 2135  –  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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