Conjunction of Venus and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 4°32' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From Los Angeles however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 Venus 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
Venus 08h33m40s 18°42'N Cancer -4.0 12"9
1 Ceres 08h33m40s 23°14'N Cancer 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 May 2025

The sky on 12 May 2025
Sunrise
05:51
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:21
Twilight begins
04:14


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 11:38 18:10
Venus 03:49 09:59 16:09
Moon 19:17 00:25 05:27
Mars 11:26 18:23 01:21
Jupiter 07:50 15:00 22:10
Saturn 03:32 09:28 15:24
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

07 Nov 1984  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Feb 1986  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Jun 1987  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Sep 1988  –  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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