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 48.2 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 16° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 09h47m30s 14°54'N Leo -9.9 32'22"9
Uranus 09h46m00s 14°10'N Leo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jul 2024

The sky on 27 July 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:14
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
03:46


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:02 14:38 21:13
Venus 06:55 13:58 21:01
Moon 23:15 06:02 13:02
Mars 01:21 08:40 15:59
Jupiter 01:53 09:18 16:42
Saturn 22:11 03:51 09:32
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.

Related news

24 Apr 2044  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
01 Dec 2044  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
12 Feb 2045  –  Uranus at opposition
29 Apr 2045  –  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.

Share