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 12.8 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 27 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h08m50s 6°24'N Pisces -10.2 32'37"0
Uranus 01h08m40s 6°37'N Pisces 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Nov 2024

The sky on 25 November 2024
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
16:26
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Crescent

23%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:30 12:58 17:26
Venus 10:15 14:43 19:11
Moon 01:23 07:34 13:35
Mars 20:42 04:05 11:28
Jupiter 17:13 00:40 08:07
Saturn 12:57 18:29 00:01
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

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