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 6°49' 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 15° above the horizon at dusk.

Saturn will be at mag 0.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h11m40s 7°16'N Leo 0.9 16"3
1 Ceres 11h11m40s 14°06'N Leo 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jul 2026

The sky on 30 July 2026
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:54
Twilight ends
21:30
Twilight begins
04:22


Waning Gibbous

97%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:37 11:36 18:35
Venus 09:39 15:50 22:01
Moon 20:20 01:32 06:52
Mars 02:32 09:43 16:54
Jupiter 05:56 12:53 19:50
Saturn 23:04 05:16 11:28
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.

Related news

04 Feb 2156  –  1 Ceres at opposition
01 Jun 2157  –  1 Ceres at opposition
01 Sep 2158  –  1 Ceres at opposition
01 Dec 2159  –  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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