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 3°28' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:00 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 61° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:56.

Mars will be at mag 0.8, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.6, 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 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 08h48m00s 19°14'N Cancer 0.8 6"5
1 Ceres 08h48m00s 22°43'N Cancer 8.6 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
03:30


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:47 11:24 18:01
Venus 03:41 09:52 16:03
Moon 18:18 23:27 04:28
Mars 11:00 18:19 01:38
Jupiter 07:23 14:58 22:33
Saturn 03:33 09:27 15:21
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

20 Oct 1993  –  1 Ceres at opposition
31 Jan 1995  –  1 Ceres at opposition
28 May 1996  –  1 Ceres at opposition
28 Aug 1997  –  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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