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°44' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 16° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h15m30s 22°13'S Capricornus -4.2 18"1
1 Ceres 20h15m30s 26°58'S Capricornus 9.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Dec 2024

The sky on 8 December 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:42
Twilight ends
18:11
Twilight begins
05:13


Waxing Gibbous

54%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 11:16 16:23
Venus 09:57 14:56 19:55
Moon 12:21 18:14 00:15
Mars 20:11 03:17 10:22
Jupiter 16:30 23:36 06:43
Saturn 11:59 17:38 23:18
All times shown in PST.

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

05 Jul 2024  –  1 Ceres at opposition
02 Oct 2025  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jan 2027  –  1 Ceres at opposition
06 May 2028  –  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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