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°03' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:35 (EST), 22° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 23 minutes after the Sun at 22:47.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.9, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h12m30s 22°59'N Taurus -4.1 15"5
1 Ceres 04h12m30s 20°56'N Taurus 8.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Apr 2031

The sky on 15 April 2031
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:24
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:20

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

30%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 11:38 17:52
Venus 07:46 15:21 22:55
Moon 02:33 07:44 13:01
Mars 21:18 02:20 07:21
Jupiter 00:31 05:04 09:37
Saturn 08:06 15:26 22:46
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

07 Nov 2030  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Feb 2032  –  1 Ceres at opposition
17 Jun 2033  –  1 Ceres at opposition
14 Sep 2034  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
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