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 19' to the north 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 5° above the horizon at dawn.

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1 Ceres will be at mag 9.2, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 20h54m20s 22°40'S Capricornus 9.2 0"0
134340 Pluto 20h54m20s 23°00'S Capricornus 15.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 58° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2029

The sky on 28 March 2029
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
04:55

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:42 12:56 19:10
Venus 06:42 12:54 19:06
Moon 17:45 23:50 05:43
Mars 18:28 00:37 06:47
Jupiter 20:17 01:51 07:25
Saturn 07:59 14:49 21:40
All times shown in EDT.

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

30 Jul 2028  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
01 Aug 2029  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
02 Aug 2030  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
04 Aug 2031  –  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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