The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Mars and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mars and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 3°03' 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 13° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mars will be at mag 1.5, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.0, both in the constellation Aries.

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 03h22m50s 19°03'N Aries 1.5 4"0
1 Ceres 03h22m50s 16°00'N Aries 9.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Apr 2017

The sky on 11 April 2017
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:40

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

98%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 13:37 20:37
Venus 04:57 11:13 17:29
Moon 18:58 00:56 06:48
Mars 07:40 14:54 22:07
Jupiter 18:57 00:41 06:25
Saturn 00:42 05:23 10:03
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

20 Oct 2016  –  1 Ceres at opposition
31 Jan 2018  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 May 2019  –  1 Ceres at opposition
28 Aug 2020  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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