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 56' 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 1.1, 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 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 05h13m10s 24°52'N Taurus 1.1 9"1
1 Ceres 05h13m10s 23°56'N Taurus 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Nov 2025

The sky on 7 November 2025
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
16:53
Twilight ends
18:19
Twilight begins
04:49


Waning Gibbous

87%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:05 12:58 17:51
Venus 05:05 10:39 16:13
Moon 17:47 01:19 08:57
Mars 07:39 12:42 17:45
Jupiter 21:27 04:31 11:35
Saturn 14:36 20:27 02:19
All times shown in PST.

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

08 Nov 2007  –  1 Ceres at opposition
23 Feb 2009  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Jun 2010  –  1 Ceres at opposition
15 Sep 2011  –  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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