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 a mere 30.3 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 20 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:02 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 38° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:29.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 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 21h17m00s 15°59'S Capricornus -12.2 30'28"1
Uranus 21h17m30s 16°28'S Capricornus 5.8 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 117° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jun 2025

The sky on 9 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 13:44 21:01
Venus 03:15 09:46 16:17
Moon 19:08 23:56 04:41
Mars 10:47 17:30 00:12
Jupiter 06:25 13:36 20:47
Saturn 01:46 07:45 13:43
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 May 1999  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
07 Aug 1999  –  Uranus at opposition
22 Oct 1999  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
25 May 2000  –  Uranus enters 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.

Share