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°13' 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 12 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:32 (EDT), 26° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:24, 54° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:47, when they sink below 21° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h48m10s 5°44'N Pisces -12.7 32'20"5
Uranus 00h49m40s 4°35'N Pisces 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 151° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Apr 2024

The sky on 27 April 2024
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
20:22
Twilight ends
22:04
Twilight begins
04:52


Waning Gibbous

85%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:50 12:08 18:26
Venus 06:16 12:51 19:25
Moon 23:35 04:04 08:30
Mars 05:04 10:59 16:55
Jupiter 07:24 14:30 21:35
Saturn 04:39 10:18 15:57
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

07 Oct 2014  –  Uranus at opposition
21 Dec 2014  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
26 Jul 2015  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
11 Oct 2015  –  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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