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°54' to the south 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 13° 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 15h06m30s 16°25'S Libra -3.9 10"0
1 Ceres 15h06m30s 12°30'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 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
03:19


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 14:31 21:47
Venus 06:08 13:35 21:03
Moon 06:44 14:31 22:08
Mars 01:56 09:01 16:07
Jupiter 02:57 10:19 17:42
Saturn 23:31 05:12 10:53
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

24 Feb 2009  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Jun 2010  –  1 Ceres at opposition
16 Sep 2011  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 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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