Venus and 1 Ceres will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 3°04' to the south of 1 Ceres.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:12 (EST) – 3 hours and 59 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:57.
Venus will be at mag -4.5, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.8, both in the constellation Libra.
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 | 15h16m00s | 14°35'S | Libra | -4.5 | 27"2 |
| 1 Ceres | 15h16m00s | 11°30'S | Libra | 8.8 | 0"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.
The sky on 28 Dec 2018
| The sky on 28 December 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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46% 21 days old |
All times shown in EST.
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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.
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| 30 Jan 2018 | – 1 Ceres at opposition |
| 28 May 2019 | – 1 Ceres at opposition |
| 28 Aug 2020 | – 1 Ceres at opposition |
| 26 Nov 2021 | – 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.