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 4°14' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:03 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 36° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:07.

1 Ceres will be at mag 8.9, and 134340 Pluto at mag 16.1, 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 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 06h25m20s 22°55'N Gemini 8.9 0"0
134340 Pluto 06h25m20s 18°40'N Gemini 16.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Aug 2026

The sky on 6 August 2026
Sunrise
06:04
Sunset
19:48
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:29


Waning Crescent

41%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:38 11:39 18:41
Venus 09:46 15:47 21:49
Moon 23:43 06:56 14:17
Mars 02:24 09:36 16:48
Jupiter 05:36 12:32 19:28
Saturn 22:36 04:48 11:00
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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