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°10' of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 22:41 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 67° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:18.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. 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 05h26m50s 22°07'N Taurus -11.9 29'34"1
Uranus 05h26m50s 23°17'N Taurus 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 93° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Sep 2030

The sky on 19 September 2030
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
18:46
Twilight ends
20:21
Twilight begins
04:50


Waning Crescent

48%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:59 11:36 18:13
Venus 05:43 12:08 18:33
Moon 22:37 06:14 13:51
Mars 03:26 10:27 17:29
Jupiter 11:18 16:13 21:08
Saturn 21:59 05:19 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.

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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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