Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

The Moon at aphelion

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Moon feed

Objects: The Moon
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its furthest point from the Sun – its aphelion – at a distance of 0.9911 AU from the Sun.

This happens at around the time when the Moon's orbit carries it around the far side of the Earth as seen from the Sun, at around the same time that it passes full moon.

At the moment of the Moon's aphelion, the Earth will lie at a distance of 0.9889 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9911 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0024 AU (360,000 km).

The positions of the Sun and Moon in the sky will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 11h54m30s 5°31'N Virgo 33'06"
Sun (centre) 22h16m 10°41'S Aquarius 32'20"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 21 Feb 2019

The sky on 21 February 2019
Sunrise
06:23
Sunset
17:38
Twilight ends
19:01
Twilight begins
05:01

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

92%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:10 13:03 18:55
Venus 04:03 09:10 14:18
Moon 19:07 01:39 08:04
Mars 09:12 15:51 22:29
Jupiter 02:02 07:03 12:04
Saturn 03:53 08:56 13:59
All times shown in PST.

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

19 Feb 2019  –  Full Moon
26 Feb 2019  –  Moon at Last Quarter
06 Mar 2019  –  New Moon
14 Mar 2019  –  Moon at First Quarter

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

Share

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme