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 4°42' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.7, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h26m10s 20°51'N Cancer -3.9 11"0
1 Ceres 08h26m10s 25°33'N Cancer 8.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 11 May 2025

The sky on 11 May 2025
Sunrise
05:24
Sunset
19:54
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:29


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:47 11:26 18:06
Venus 03:40 09:51 16:03
Moon 18:18 --:-- 04:28
Mars 10:59 18:17 01:36
Jupiter 07:20 14:55 22:30
Saturn 03:29 09:23 15:18
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 Dec 2012  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Apr 2014  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Jul 2015  –  1 Ceres at opposition
20 Oct 2016  –  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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