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 9°52' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:42 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 43° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:48.

Mars will be at mag -1.3 in the constellation Pisces, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 00h21m00s 2°24'S Pisces -1.3 15"7
1 Ceres 00h21m00s 12°17'S Cetus 8.5 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 116° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Aug 2025

The sky on 26 August 2025
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
19:25
Twilight ends
20:53
Twilight begins
04:50


Waxing Crescent

13%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:03 11:51 18:40
Venus 03:44 10:43 17:43
Moon 09:40 15:25 21:03
Mars 09:25 15:15 21:06
Jupiter 02:35 09:43 16:50
Saturn 20:39 02:36 08:33
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

18 Jun 1987  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Sep 1988  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Dec 1989  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Apr 1991  –  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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