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°17' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:13 (PDT) – 3 hours and 0 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:12.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h29m00s 0°59'S Virgo -10.2 31'21"5
Uranus 12h27m20s 2°12'S Virgo 5.5 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 Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Mar 2026

The sky on 24 March 2026
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:24


Waxing Crescent

41%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 11:25 17:05
Venus 07:41 14:06 20:31
Moon 10:36 18:15 01:54
Mars 06:11 11:57 17:43
Jupiter 12:37 19:47 02:56
Saturn 06:59 13:02 19:04
All times shown in PDT.

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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12 Jun 2054  –  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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