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°06' 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 8 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:52 (EST), 22° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:49.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h13m00s 22°12'S Scorpius -12.1 31'37"7
Uranus 16h13m20s 21°06'S Scorpius 5.6 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 100° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Nov 2024

The sky on 26 November 2024
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:06


Waning Crescent

12%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:21 12:45 17:10
Venus 10:11 14:36 19:00
Moon 02:14 08:04 13:43
Mars 20:26 03:53 11:20
Jupiter 16:56 00:27 07:58
Saturn 12:46 18:17 23:48
All times shown in EST.

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

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18 Mar 2068  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
02 Jun 2068  –  Uranus at opposition
18 Aug 2068  –  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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