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

Conjunction of Venus and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°32' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 15° from it.

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Venus will be at mag -3.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.0, 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 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 19h07m40s 22°44'S Sagittarius -3.9 10"2
1 Ceres 19h07m40s 25°17'S Sagittarius 9.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Jan 2029

The sky on 20 January 2029
Sunrise
07:05
Sunset
16:42
Twilight ends
18:21
Twilight begins
05:27

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

36%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:17 11:10 16:03
Venus 06:16 10:50 15:23
Moon 09:36 16:09 22:52
Mars 22:28 04:26 10:23
Jupiter 23:53 05:23 10:53
Saturn 11:10 17:53 00:35
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

06 May 2028  –  1 Ceres at opposition
10 Aug 2029  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Nov 2030  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Feb 2032  –  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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42.38°N
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