Conjunction of Jupiter and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 3°30' 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 11° above the horizon at dawn.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.1, 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 04h15m50s 20°30'N Taurus -2.1 33"6
1 Ceres 04h15m50s 17°00'N Taurus 9.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 11 May 2024

The sky on 11 May 2024
Sunrise
05:36
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:53
Twilight begins
03:44


Waxing Crescent

15%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:44 11:10 17:37
Venus 05:24 12:23 19:21
Moon 08:00 16:13 00:22
Mars 03:55 10:05 16:15
Jupiter 05:58 13:09 20:21
Saturn 03:09 08:49 14:28
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
15 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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