Conjunction of Venus and Ceres

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°03' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.1, 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 18h44m20s 22°17'S Sagittarius -4.0 12"6
1 Ceres 18h44m20s 24°20'S Sagittarius 9.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Dec 2025

The sky on 18 December 2025
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:44
Twilight ends
18:14
Twilight begins
05:20


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:27 10:30 15:34
Venus 06:32 11:27 16:23
Moon 05:58 10:43 15:24
Mars 07:19 12:11 17:03
Jupiter 18:35 01:40 08:46
Saturn 11:54 17:46 23:38
All times shown in PST.

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

15 Apr 1991  –  1 Ceres at opposition
24 Jul 1992  –  1 Ceres at opposition
21 Oct 1993  –  1 Ceres at opposition
01 Feb 1995  –  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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