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 5°26' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 21° from it.

Saturn will be at mag 0.4, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.7, 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 09h39m20s 15°05'N Leo 0.4 16"4
1 Ceres 09h39m20s 20°32'N Leo 8.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Aug 2026

The sky on 21 August 2026
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
19:31
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
04:45


Waxing Gibbous

66%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:45 12:32 19:18
Venus 09:57 15:39 21:21
Moon 15:28 20:08 00:48
Mars 02:08 09:20 16:32
Jupiter 04:53 11:46 18:40
Saturn 21:37 03:47 09:58
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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07 Oct 2186  –  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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