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°04' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h54m10s 22°25'N Gemini -10.2 31'15"4
Uranus 07h53m40s 21°21'N Gemini 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
05:12
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:01


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:03 14:22 21:42
Venus 05:55 13:27 20:58
Moon 06:30 14:22 22:03
Mars 01:45 08:53 16:01
Jupiter 02:44 10:11 17:37
Saturn 23:23 05:03 10:44
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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16 Jan 2039  –  Uranus at opposition
01 Apr 2039  –  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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