Conjunction of Mars and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 5°14' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:12 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 61° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:20.

Mars will be at mag 0.1, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars 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
Mars 04h26m10s 20°34'N Taurus 0.1 8"7
1 Ceres 04h26m10s 15°20'N Taurus 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Sep 2025

The sky on 28 September 2025
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
18:39
Twilight ends
20:03
Twilight begins
05:18


Waxing Crescent

44%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:39 13:24 19:09
Venus 04:46 11:12 17:39
Moon 13:19 17:57 22:35
Mars 09:00 14:27 19:54
Jupiter 00:50 07:55 15:01
Saturn 18:24 00:17 06:11
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 1974  –  1 Ceres at opposition
27 Nov 1975  –  1 Ceres at opposition
21 Mar 1977  –  1 Ceres at opposition
06 Jul 1978  –  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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