Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 31.1 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 17:37 (EST), 43° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:33.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.3; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter 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
Jupiter 23h50m30s 2°22'S Pisces -2.3 37"4
Uranus 23h49m40s 1°54'S Pisces 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 73° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2024

The sky on 29 November 2024
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:12
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:09


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:01 12:29 16:58
Venus 10:12 14:39 19:06
Moon 05:25 10:10 14:48
Mars 20:16 03:43 11:10
Jupiter 16:43 00:13 07:44
Saturn 12:35 18:05 23:36
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

05 Dec 2010  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
09 Jul 2011  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
25 Sep 2011  –  Uranus at opposition
10 Dec 2011  –  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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