Close approach of the Moon and Collinder 50

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Collinder 50 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 34.2 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:07 (EST), 31° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 35 minutes after the Sun at 23:03.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8; and Collinder 50 will be at mag 1.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Collinder 50 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 04h26m40s 16°33'N Taurus -10.8 32'40"6
Collinder 50 04h27m00s 16°00'N Taurus 1.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Apr 2016

The sky on 10 April 2016
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:41


Waxing Crescent

20%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:55 13:55 20:56
Venus 05:53 11:59 18:06
Moon 08:55 16:04 23:19
Mars 23:19 04:04 08:48
Jupiter 16:08 22:38 05:07
Saturn 23:51 04:36 09:22
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.

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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