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 1°48' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 17° from it.

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

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 04h24m20s 20°46'N Taurus -3.9 10"2
1 Ceres 04h24m20s 18°58'N Taurus 8.9 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 Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 May 2025

The sky on 13 May 2025
Sunrise
05:34
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:55
Twilight begins
03:41


Waning Gibbous

98%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:40 18:23
Venus 03:46 09:58 16:11
Moon 20:32 01:06 05:34
Mars 11:08 18:22 01:36
Jupiter 07:27 14:58 22:29
Saturn 03:30 09:25 15:19
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

02 Oct 2002  –  1 Ceres at opposition
08 Jan 2004  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 May 2005  –  1 Ceres at opposition
11 Aug 2006  –  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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