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 8°07' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 18:39 (PST), 24° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 2 minutes after the Sun at 20:41.

Venus will be at mag -4.2 in the constellation Pisces, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 00h50m10s 5°41'N Pisces -4.2 17"0
1 Ceres 00h50m10s 2°26'S Cetus 9.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Feb 2026

The sky on 23 February 2026
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
17:42
Twilight ends
19:06
Twilight begins
05:02


Waxing Crescent

49%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:03 13:03 19:02
Venus 07:04 12:49 18:33
Moon 09:56 17:18 00:47
Mars 06:02 11:25 16:48
Jupiter 13:32 20:41 03:51
Saturn 07:44 13:43 19:41
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

16 Sep 2011  –  1 Ceres at opposition
18 Dec 2012  –  1 Ceres at opposition
15 Apr 2014  –  1 Ceres at opposition
25 Jul 2015  –  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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