Conjunction of Neptune and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Neptune and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Neptune passing 8°22' 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 0° above the horizon at dawn.

Neptune will be at mag 7.9 in the constellation Pisces, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.3 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

A graph of the angular separation between Neptune 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
Neptune 00h05m40s 0°46'S Pisces 7.9 2"2
1 Ceres 00h05m40s 9°08'S Cetus 9.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:46


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:32 18:08
Venus 03:50 10:01 16:12
Moon 18:24 23:36 04:39
Mars 11:12 18:28 01:43
Jupiter 07:36 15:07 22:38
Saturn 03:41 09:36 15:30
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

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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