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 4°46' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From Fairfield 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.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.9, both in the constellation Libra.

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 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 14h27m50s 14°48'S Libra -3.9 11"9
1 Ceres 14h27m50s 10°02'S Libra 8.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2024

The sky on 16 June 2024
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:08


Waxing Gibbous

75%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 13:02 20:40
Venus 05:32 13:06 20:40
Moon 15:13 20:47 02:11
Mars 02:38 09:24 16:11
Jupiter 04:03 11:22 18:42
Saturn 00:53 06:34 12:16
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

21 Mar 2000  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jul 2001  –  1 Ceres at opposition
03 Oct 2002  –  1 Ceres at opposition
09 Jan 2004  –  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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