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 7°58' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mars will be at mag 1.2, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.2, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h22m30s 4°53'S Aquarius 1.2 4"1
1 Ceres 23h22m30s 12°51'S Aquarius 9.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Feb 2030

The sky on 14 February 2030
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
18:05
Twilight ends
19:36
Twilight begins
05:52

12-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

90%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:46 11:39 16:33
Venus 04:49 09:53 14:56
Moon 14:40 22:05 05:24
Mars 08:28 14:14 20:01
Jupiter 01:30 06:30 11:29
Saturn 11:01 17:57 00:53
All times shown in EST.

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

10 Aug 2029  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Nov 2030  –  1 Ceres at opposition
23 Feb 2032  –  1 Ceres at opposition
16 Jun 2033  –  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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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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