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 3°56' to the south 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 14° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.7, 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 15h04m10s 16°14'S Libra -3.9 10"0
1 Ceres 15h04m10s 12°18'S Libra 8.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jul 2025

The sky on 8 July 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
04:02


Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:39 21:28
Venus 03:00 09:55 16:50
Moon 18:55 23:34 04:13
Mars 10:13 16:38 23:02
Jupiter 05:00 12:11 19:21
Saturn 23:55 05:54 11:53
All times shown in PDT.

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

23 Feb 2009  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Jun 2010  –  1 Ceres at opposition
15 Sep 2011  –  1 Ceres at opposition
16 Dec 2012  –  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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