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 36.1 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 14 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 21:08 and 02:03. They will become accessible at around 21:08, when they rise to an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:35, 30° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 02:03 when they sink below 21° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. 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 21h06m40s 16°40'S Capricornus -12.6 30'41"5
Uranus 21h07m10s 17°16'S Capricornus 5.7 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 162° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
16:16
Twilight ends
17:55
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Crescent

45%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:36 12:57 17:19
Venus 10:09 14:31 18:53
Moon 22:03 05:23 12:29
Mars 20:40 04:06 11:33
Jupiter 17:14 00:45 08:16
Saturn 13:02 18:32 00:03
All times shown in EST.

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

07 Aug 1999  –  Uranus at opposition
23 Oct 1999  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
25 May 2000  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
11 Aug 2000  –  Uranus 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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