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 30.8 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 15 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 23:42 and 02:40. They will become accessible at around 23:42, when they rise to an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 01:11, 24° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 02:40 when they sink below 21° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h53m00s 22°44'S Sagittarius -12.8 33'25"4
Uranus 18h53m00s 23°15'S Sagittarius 5.6 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 174° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
16:16
Twilight ends
17:55
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Crescent

46%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:36 12:57 17:19
Venus 10:09 14:31 18:53
Moon 22:03 05:23 12:29
Mars 20:40 04:06 11:33
Jupiter 17:14 00:45 08:16
Saturn 13:02 18:32 00:03
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.

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04 Jul 2075  –  Uranus at opposition
19 Sep 2075  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
22 Apr 2076  –  Uranus enters 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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