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 5°53' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Mercury will be at mag -0.4, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.2, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h53m30s 9°31'S Aquarius -0.4 5"2
1 Ceres 22h53m30s 15°24'S Aquarius 9.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Aug 2025

The sky on 14 August 2025
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:38


Waning Gibbous

55%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:34
Venus 03:25 10:30 17:35
Moon 22:17 05:01 11:55
Mars 09:36 15:35 21:34
Jupiter 03:11 10:20 17:28
Saturn 21:28 03:26 09:23
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

06 Jul 2001  –  1 Ceres at opposition
02 Oct 2002  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jan 2004  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 May 2005  –  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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