Conjunction of Ceres and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


1 Ceres and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with 1 Ceres passing 8°43' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

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 3° below the horizon at dawn.

1 Ceres will be at mag 8.9 in the constellation Taurus, and 134340 Pluto at mag 16.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Orion.

A graph of the angular separation between 1 Ceres and 134340 Pluto 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
1 Ceres 04h47m00s 20°12'N Taurus 8.9 0"0
134340 Pluto 04h47m00s 11°29'N Orion 16.4 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2026

The sky on 17 July 2026
Sunrise
05:50
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
04:09


Waxing Crescent

21%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:31 12:23 19:15
Venus 09:23 15:51 22:19
Moon 09:36 16:04 22:22
Mars 02:48 09:56 17:03
Jupiter 06:33 13:32 20:32
Saturn 23:55 06:07 12:19
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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