Close approach of the Moon and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°06' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 Uranus 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 18h53m50s 24°18'S Sagittarius -10.2 29'38"8
Uranus 18h53m00s 23°12'S Sagittarius 5.8 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 May 2025

The sky on 14 May 2025
Sunrise
05:33
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:57
Twilight begins
03:39


Waning Gibbous

93%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:43 18:29
Venus 03:44 09:57 16:11
Moon 21:35 01:55 06:11
Mars 11:07 18:20 01:33
Jupiter 07:24 14:55 22:26
Saturn 03:26 09:21 15:16
All times shown in EDT.

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

14 Sep 1990  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
18 Apr 1991  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
04 Jul 1991  –  Uranus at opposition
19 Sep 1991  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

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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