Conjunction of Neptune and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Neptune and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Neptune passing 8°02' to the north 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 11° above the horizon at dusk.

Neptune will be at mag 8.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.3, both in the constellation Aquarius.

A graph of the angular separation between Neptune 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
Neptune 22h07m40s 12°07'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2
1 Ceres 22h07m40s 20°09'S Aquarius 9.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Aug 2026

The sky on 14 August 2026
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:38


Waxing Crescent

11%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:07 12:04 19:01
Venus 09:52 15:44 21:35
Moon 08:21 14:39 20:48
Mars 02:15 09:28 16:40
Jupiter 05:13 12:08 19:02
Saturn 22:05 04:16 10:27
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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05 Feb 2179  –  1 Ceres at opposition
02 Jun 2180  –  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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