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 7°23' 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 2° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.0 in the constellation Pisces, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.3 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 00h47m40s 3°12'N Pisces -4.0 14"3
1 Ceres 00h47m40s 4°11'S Cetus 9.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 21 May 2026

The sky on 21 May 2026
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
19:50
Twilight ends
21:30
Twilight begins
04:05


Waxing Crescent

35%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:12 13:22 20:32
Venus 07:49 15:06 22:23
Moon 10:47 17:55 00:54
Mars 04:19 10:54 17:28
Jupiter 09:21 16:28 23:35
Saturn 03:29 09:38 15:47
All times shown in PDT.

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

24 Jul 2061  –  1 Ceres at opposition
21 Oct 2062  –  1 Ceres at opposition
31 Jan 2064  –  1 Ceres at opposition
29 May 2065  –  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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