Conjunction of Mercury and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 9°10' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dusk.

Mercury will be at mag -0.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.7, both in the constellation Virgo.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury 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
Mercury 11h57m30s 0°38'S Virgo -0.0 6"0
1 Ceres 11h57m30s 8°32'N Virgo 8.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2025

The sky on 11 October 2025
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
18:22
Twilight ends
19:45
Twilight begins
05:28


Waning Gibbous

63%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:26 13:46 19:07
Venus 05:11 11:21 17:30
Moon 21:00 04:37 12:17
Mars 08:52 14:10 19:29
Jupiter 00:06 07:11 14:15
Saturn 17:26 23:19 05:12
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

30 Jan 1995  –  1 Ceres at opposition
28 May 1996  –  1 Ceres at opposition
28 Aug 1997  –  1 Ceres at opposition
27 Nov 1998  –  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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