Close approach of the Moon and M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and M44 will make a close approach, passing within 1°03' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:00 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 39° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:39.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 M44 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 08h38m50s 18°41'N Cancer -11.1 32'40"8
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Sep 2027

The sky on 25 September 2027
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
18:45
Twilight ends
20:17
Twilight begins
05:07


Waning Crescent

16%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:00 14:15 19:30
Venus 07:42 13:29 19:16
Moon 01:06 08:43 16:08
Mars 10:25 15:26 20:28
Jupiter 05:03 11:34 18:04
Saturn 19:48 02:17 08:46
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.

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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