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°10' of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 18:34 (EDT), 49° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:17.

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 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 02h49m00s 17°08'N Aries -11.4 31'00"7
Uranus 02h50m50s 16°02'N Aries 5.8 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Feb 2023

The sky on 25 February 2023
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
17:28
Twilight ends
19:02
Twilight begins
04:51


Waxing Crescent

36%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:58 10:59 16:00
Venus 07:37 13:47 19:56
Moon 09:09 16:30 00:05
Mars 10:40 18:26 02:12
Jupiter 07:49 14:04 20:19
Saturn 06:13 11:27 16:41
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.

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13 Nov 2023  –  Uranus at opposition
27 Jan 2024  –  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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