The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
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 and M44 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 57.2 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:33 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 66° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:00.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They 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 the Moon and M44 around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 08h41m00s 20°36'N Cancer -11.8 32'04"4
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Oct 2019

The sky on 21 October 2019
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
18:08
Twilight ends
19:31
Twilight begins
05:32

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

36%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:59 14:04 19:09
Venus 08:23 13:42 19:01
Moon 23:33 06:52 14:07
Mars 05:37 11:31 17:24
Jupiter 11:09 16:09 21:09
Saturn 12:49 17:51 22:52
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.

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme