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 11.6 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 5 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:48 (PDT), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 20:48.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 21h06m30s 17°28'S Capricornus -10.9 29'53"1
Uranus 21h06m20s 17°17'S Capricornus 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Oct 2025

The sky on 29 October 2025
Sunrise
07:06
Sunset
18:01
Twilight ends
19:26
Twilight begins
05:42


Waxing Gibbous

53%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:10 14:06 19:03
Venus 05:46 11:32 17:18
Moon 14:11 19:16 00:26
Mars 08:43 13:50 18:58
Jupiter 23:01 06:05 13:09
Saturn 16:12 22:04 03:56
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

22 Oct 1999  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
25 May 2000  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
10 Aug 2000  –  Uranus at opposition
26 Oct 2000  –  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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