The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 35.0 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 26 days old.
From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:44 (PDT) – 3 hours and 12 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:49.
The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. 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 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 | 05h20m00s | 22°36'N | Taurus | -10.3 | 29'35"0 |
| Uranus | 05h20m00s | 23°11'N | Taurus | 5.7 | 3"5 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.
The sky on 26 Jul 2030
| The sky on 26 July 2030 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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10% 26 days old |
All times shown in PDT.
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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.