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 39' to the north of 1 Ceres.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and 1 Ceres at mag 9.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 17h36m00s 24°14'S Ophiuchus -3.9 10"6
1 Ceres 17h36m00s 24°53'S Ophiuchus 9.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Aug 2026

The sky on 7 August 2026
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:47
Twilight ends
21:21
Twilight begins
04:30


Waning Crescent

29%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:40 11:41 18:43
Venus 09:47 15:47 21:48
Moon 00:27 07:55 15:29
Mars 02:23 09:35 16:47
Jupiter 05:33 12:29 19:25
Saturn 22:32 04:44 10:56
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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

12 May 2166  –  1 Ceres at opposition
15 Aug 2167  –  1 Ceres at opposition
11 Nov 2168  –  1 Ceres at opposition
01 Mar 2170  –  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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