Close approach of the Moon and M45

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and M45 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 54.7 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:00, when they reach an altitude of 12° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:57, 83° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:46, 51° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and M45 will be at mag 1.3. 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 M45 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 03h46m30s 24°59'N Taurus -12.6 32'58"4
M45 03h47m30s 24°06'N Taurus 1.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 136° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Oct 2025

The sky on 10 October 2025
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
19:00
Twilight ends
20:20
Twilight begins
06:03


Waning Gibbous

82%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:51 14:19 19:47
Venus 05:45 11:54 18:04
Moon 20:48 04:02 11:22
Mars 09:21 14:46 20:11
Jupiter 00:53 07:49 14:45
Saturn 18:08 00:02 05:56
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.

Share