Conjunction of Uranus and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Uranus and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Uranus passing 2°49' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:53 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 24° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:13.

Uranus will be at mag 5.7, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Uranus 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
Uranus 17h45m20s 23°31'S Sagittarius 5.7 3"6
1 Ceres 17h45m20s 20°42'S Sagittarius 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 12 May 2025

The sky on 12 May 2025
Sunrise
05:35
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:54
Twilight begins
03:42


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:37 18:18
Venus 03:47 09:59 16:11
Moon 19:28 00:19 05:04
Mars 11:09 18:24 01:38
Jupiter 07:30 15:01 22:32
Saturn 03:34 09:28 15:23
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

24 Feb 1986  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Jun 1987  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Sep 1988  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Dec 1989  –  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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