Close approach of the Moon and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°11' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:34 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 56° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:57.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. 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 through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Uranus 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 05h07m20s 24°06'N Taurus -11.6 30'06"6
Uranus 05h07m30s 22°54'N Taurus 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 81° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2029

The sky on 1 September 2029
Sunrise
06:06
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:26


Waning Crescent

37%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:10 13:58 19:46
Venus 09:36 15:10 20:45
Moon 22:55 06:40 14:26
Mars 11:51 16:48 21:45
Jupiter 10:03 15:34 21:05
Saturn 22:25 05:32 12:39
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.

Related news

16 Feb 2029  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
23 Sep 2029  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
08 Dec 2029  –  Uranus at opposition
20 Feb 2030  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share