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 8°08' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 21° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.2 in the constellation Pisces, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 00h48m20s 5°28'N Pisces -4.2 17"0
1 Ceres 00h48m20s 2°40'S Cetus 9.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2024

The sky on 17 July 2024
Sunrise
05:32
Sunset
20:22
Twilight ends
22:22
Twilight begins
03:31


Waxing Gibbous

88%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:44 21:39
Venus 06:31 13:47 21:04
Moon 17:22 21:50 02:13
Mars 01:38 08:51 16:03
Jupiter 02:25 09:49 17:12
Saturn 22:51 04:32 10:13
All times shown in EDT.

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

16 Sep 2011  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Dec 2012  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Apr 2014  –  1 Ceres at opposition
25 Jul 2015  –  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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