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 Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

1 Ceres and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with 1 Ceres passing 3°50' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

From Cambridge 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.

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1 Ceres will be at mag 9.2, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.2, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h11m40s 27°11'S Capricornus 9.2 0"0
134340 Pluto 20h11m40s 23°20'S Capricornus 15.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Dec 2024

The sky on 5 December 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
16:11
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:15

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

26%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 11:38 16:18
Venus 10:13 14:45 19:18
Moon 10:59 15:32 20:13
Mars 19:53 03:21 10:49
Jupiter 16:12 23:42 07:13
Saturn 12:11 17:42 23:14
All times shown in EST.

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

23 Jul 2024  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
25 Jul 2025  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
27 Jul 2026  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
29 Jul 2027  –  134340 Pluto 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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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