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 a mere 29.5 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:51 (EST), 62° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:50.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 04h51m30s 23°02'N Taurus -11.7 29'38"1
Uranus 04h51m30s 22°33'N Taurus 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 83° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Mar 2030

The sky on 11 March 2030
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
18:45
Twilight ends
20:18
Twilight begins
05:27


Waxing Crescent

49%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 13:00 18:47
Venus 04:50 09:51 14:51
Moon 10:44 18:25 02:07
Mars 07:45 13:59 20:13
Jupiter 00:16 05:08 10:01
Saturn 09:35 16:38 23:41
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.

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25 Feb 2031  –  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.

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