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 4°36' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 21° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9 in the constellation Aries, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

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 02h32m40s 14°52'N Aries -3.9 10"8
1 Ceres 02h32m40s 10°16'N Cetus 9.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Apr 2026

The sky on 8 April 2026
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:34


Waning Gibbous

61%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:25 11:08 16:50
Venus 07:10 14:09 21:09
Moon 01:25 05:30 09:34
Mars 05:35 11:33 17:31
Jupiter 11:11 18:45 02:19
Saturn 05:57 12:02 18:07
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

02 Oct 2025  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jan 2027  –  1 Ceres at opposition
06 May 2028  –  1 Ceres at opposition
10 Aug 2029  –  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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