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 50.7 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:38 (EST), 48° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:17.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1; 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 03h48m00s 23°16'N Taurus -11.1 29'49"2
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 60° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Mar 2029

The sky on 20 March 2029
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
18:55
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:10


Waxing Crescent

29%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:43 12:31 18:19
Venus 06:52 12:49 18:46
Moon 09:05 16:47 00:33
Mars 19:15 01:20 07:26
Jupiter 20:53 02:26 07:59
Saturn 08:28 15:17 22:06
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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