Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon, Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°50' of each other. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the trio will become visible at around 20:42 (EDT), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 37 minutes after the Sun at 21:59.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9; Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. The trio will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 09h46m50s 13°09'N Leo -9.9 33'09"9
Venus 09h50m00s 14°49'N Leo -3.9 12"1
Uranus 09h48m10s 14°00'N Leo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jul 2024

The sky on 28 July 2024
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:13
Twilight ends
22:07
Twilight begins
03:47


Waning Crescent

39%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:01 14:36 21:10
Venus 06:57 13:59 21:00
Moon 23:40 06:52 14:18
Mars 01:19 08:39 15:58
Jupiter 01:49 09:14 16:39
Saturn 22:07 03:47 09:28
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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