The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Ceres and Eris

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

1 Ceres and 136199 Eris will share the same right ascension, with 1 Ceres passing 4°54' to the north of 136199 Eris.

From Ashburn however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 18° from it.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

1 Ceres will be at mag 9.0 in the constellation Pisces, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 136199 Eris 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 01h46m20s 3°43'N Pisces 9.0 0"0
136199 Eris 01h46m20s 1°10'S Cetus 18.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Apr 2021

The sky on 28 April 2021
Sunrise
06:13
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
04:33

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

92%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 13:47 20:54
Venus 06:41 13:40 20:39
Moon 20:52 02:10 07:20
Mars 09:22 16:54 00:26
Jupiter 03:23 08:43 14:03
Saturn 02:40 07:44 12:48
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 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

17 Oct 2020  –  136199 Eris at opposition
17 Oct 2021  –  136199 Eris at opposition
18 Oct 2022  –  136199 Eris at opposition
18 Oct 2023  –  136199 Eris 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.

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme