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 52.1 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 24 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:25 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 45° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:38.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3; 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 05h24m30s 22°23'N Taurus -11.3 29'36"6
Uranus 05h24m40s 23°15'N Taurus 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 67° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Aug 2030

The sky on 22 August 2030
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
20:18
Twilight ends
21:57
Twilight begins
05:07


Waning Crescent

26%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:02 14:14 20:26
Venus 05:28 12:33 19:37
Moon 00:52 08:22 15:53
Mars 04:38 11:53 19:09
Jupiter 13:31 18:35 23:40
Saturn 00:40 07:53 15:06
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.

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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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