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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 2°43' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:57 (PDT) – 3 hours and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:41.

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Jupiter will be at mag -1.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.9, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 17h02m40s 22°08'S Ophiuchus -1.9 33"0
1 Ceres 17h02m40s 19°25'S Ophiuchus 8.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Jun 2026

The sky on 20 June 2026
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:53

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

39%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:29 14:34 21:39
Venus 08:39 15:40 22:40
Moon 11:52 18:12 00:22
Mars 03:28 10:22 17:17
Jupiter 07:51 14:54 21:58
Saturn 01:38 07:49 14:00
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.

Related news

26 Feb 2101  –  1 Ceres at opposition
20 Jun 2102  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Sep 2103  –  1 Ceres at opposition
19 Dec 2104  –  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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

Color scheme