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 1°06' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:50 (EST) – 3 hours and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:35.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8; and M45 will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 03h46m20s 25°10'N Taurus -10.8 32'50"3
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 48° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Jul 2026

The sky on 10 July 2026
Sunrise
05:26
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:30
Twilight begins
03:22


Waning Crescent

12%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:04 13:09 20:15
Venus 09:02 15:51 22:39
Moon 01:22 08:58 16:46
Mars 02:40 10:04 17:27
Jupiter 06:37 13:55 21:13
Saturn 00:20 06:35 12:50
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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