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 5°04' 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 8° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.0, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h01m00s 19°17'S Libra -4.2 18"8
1 Ceres 15h01m00s 14°13'S Libra 9.0 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 Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 May 2025

The sky on 1 May 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
03:47


Waxing Crescent

28%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:52 11:08 17:25
Venus 03:57 10:04 16:11
Moon 08:24 16:37 00:46
Mars 11:13 18:37 02:02
Jupiter 07:51 15:26 23:00
Saturn 04:06 09:59 15:52
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

13 Apr 2037  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Jul 2038  –  1 Ceres at opposition
20 Oct 2039  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 Jan 2041  –  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.

Share