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 13.3 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 23 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:50 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 37° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:17.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 03h02m50s 17°05'N Aries -11.4 29'59"3
Uranus 03h03m10s 16°53'N Aries 5.8 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 70° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Jul 2022

The sky on 22 July 2022
Sunrise
05:36
Sunset
20:19
Twilight ends
22:16
Twilight begins
03:38


Waning Crescent

29%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 13:27 20:46
Venus 03:44 11:14 18:44
Moon 00:51 08:06 15:32
Mars 00:38 07:31 14:23
Jupiter 23:15 05:25 11:35
Saturn 21:27 02:37 07:46
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.

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09 Nov 2022  –  Uranus at opposition
22 Jan 2023  –  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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