Conjunction of Mercury and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 4°11' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 5° below the horizon at dawn.

Mercury will be at mag -0.3 in the constellation Aries, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.1 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 Mercury 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
Mercury 02h17m00s 10°57'N Aries -0.3 6"2
1 Ceres 02h17m00s 6°46'N Cetus 9.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Sep 2025

The sky on 10 September 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

81%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:18 12:41 19:03
Venus 04:11 10:58 17:45
Moon 20:18 02:55 09:42
Mars 09:13 14:52 20:32
Jupiter 01:48 08:55 16:02
Saturn 19:38 01:33 07:29
All times shown in PDT.

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

29 Aug 1951  –  1 Ceres at opposition
27 Nov 1952  –  1 Ceres at opposition
21 Mar 1954  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jul 1955  –  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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