The Large Magellanic Cloud is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed


Objects: LMC

Across much of the world, the Milky Way's dwarf companion , the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC; mag 0.9), in Dorado will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 12 December it will reach its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time, and on subsequent evenings it will culminate four minutes earlier each day.

From Cambridge , however, it is not observable because it lies so far south that it never rises above the horizon.

At a declination of 69°45'S, it is easiest to see from the southern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much north of 0°N.

At magnitude 0.9, LMC is visible to the naked eye, but best viewed through a pair of binoculars.

The position of LMC is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
LMC 05h23m30s 69°45'S Dorado 0.9 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 12 Dec 2026

The sky on 12 December 2026
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
16:11
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:20


Waxing Crescent

18%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:11 10:49 15:27
Venus 03:13 08:36 13:58
Moon 09:59 14:33 19:15
Mars 22:05 04:53 11:40
Jupiter 21:23 04:16 11:10
Saturn 12:43 18:49 00:54
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.

Image credit

© Digitised Sky Survey (DSS); Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II)

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