Mercury and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 6°05' to the north 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 10° below the horizon at dawn.
Mercury will be at mag -0.1 in the constellation Pisces, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.
A graph of the angular separation between Mercury 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 |
| Mercury | 00h14m50s | 1°16'S | Pisces | -0.1 | 6"4 |
| 1 Ceres | 00h14m50s | 7°22'S | Cetus | 9.2 | 0"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.
The sky on 2 Jul 2024
| The sky on 2 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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6% 26 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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.
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| 20 Oct 2039 | – 1 Ceres at opposition |
| 29 Jan 2041 | – 1 Ceres at opposition |
| 28 May 2042 | – 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.