Conjunction of Mars and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 2°04' to the south of 1 Ceres.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:56 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 26° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:07.

Mars will be at mag -0.3, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Mars 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
Mars 18h09m20s 23°42'S Sagittarius -0.3 10"7
1 Ceres 18h09m20s 21°38'S Sagittarius 8.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 110° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Apr 2033

The sky on 12 April 2033
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
21:07
Twilight begins
04:37


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 11:32 17:27
Venus 04:45 10:52 16:58
Moon 17:45 23:42 05:33
Mars 01:05 05:38 10:11
Jupiter 04:16 09:34 14:53
Saturn 10:03 17:33 01:02
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

23 Feb 2032  –  1 Ceres at opposition
16 Jun 2033  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Sep 2034  –  1 Ceres at opposition
16 Dec 2035  –  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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