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 20.8 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 9 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 21:49 (EDT), 30° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:10.

The Moon will be at mag -12.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 14h04m20s 12°28'S Virgo -12.0 29'35"2
Uranus 14h05m00s 12°10'S Virgo 5.5 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 108° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Apr 2025

The sky on 22 April 2025
Sunrise
06:00
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:18


Waning Crescent

25%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:10 11:12 17:14
Venus 04:24 10:30 16:36
Moon 03:28 08:23 13:27
Mars 11:39 19:05 02:31
Jupiter 08:32 16:02 23:31
Saturn 04:48 10:40 16:32
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.

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25 Apr 2060  –  Uranus at opposition
11 Jul 2060  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
15 Feb 2061  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
30 Apr 2061  –  Uranus at opposition

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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