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 4°42' to the south 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 15° above the horizon at dusk.

Mars will be at mag 1.8, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h48m30s 22°23'N Gemini 1.8 3"9
1 Ceres 07h48m30s 27°06'N Gemini 8.8 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Oct 2025

The sky on 6 October 2025
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
18:29
Twilight ends
19:52
Twilight begins
05:24


Waxing Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:09 13:38 19:08
Venus 05:02 11:18 17:34
Moon 18:15 00:41 07:21
Mars 08:55 14:17 19:38
Jupiter 00:23 07:28 14:33
Saturn 17:47 23:40 05:33
All times shown in PDT.

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 2035  –  1 Ceres at opposition
13 Apr 2037  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Jul 2038  –  1 Ceres at opposition
20 Oct 2039  –  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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