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 6°51' to the south 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 12° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and 1 Ceres at mag 8.9, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h50m40s 12°39'S Virgo -4.1 17"7
1 Ceres 13h50m40s 5°47'S Virgo 8.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Apr 2026

The sky on 21 April 2026
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:42


Waxing Crescent

29%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:25 11:32 17:38
Venus 07:29 14:29 21:29
Moon 09:30 17:09 00:46
Mars 05:17 11:27 17:37
Jupiter 10:58 18:07 01:15
Saturn 05:18 11:24 17:30
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

21 Mar 2069  –  1 Ceres at opposition
07 Jul 2070  –  1 Ceres at opposition
03 Oct 2071  –  1 Ceres at opposition
08 Jan 2073  –  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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