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 34' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:44 (PDT), 25° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 25 minutes after the Sun at 23:04.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 05h40m00s 25°44'N Taurus -4.1 16"5
1 Ceres 05h40m00s 26°18'N Taurus 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jul 2025

The sky on 12 July 2025
Sunrise
05:47
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:05


Waning Gibbous

95%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:31 21:15
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:56
Moon 21:15 02:16 07:23
Mars 10:09 16:31 22:53
Jupiter 04:49 11:59 19:09
Saturn 23:40 05:38 11:37
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

27 Nov 1998  –  1 Ceres at opposition
20 Mar 2000  –  1 Ceres at opposition
06 Jul 2001  –  1 Ceres at opposition
02 Oct 2002  –  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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