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 41.0 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 18 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:10, when they reach an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:19, 38° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 04:22, 38° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h01m20s 18°20'S Capricornus -12.4 30'44"1
Uranus 21h00m20s 17°42'S Capricornus 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 130° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jul 2025

The sky on 5 July 2025
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waxing Gibbous

79%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:43 21:35
Venus 03:00 09:53 16:46
Moon 15:58 21:02 02:00
Mars 10:17 16:43 23:09
Jupiter 05:09 12:20 19:30
Saturn 00:07 06:06 12:05
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.

Related news

17 May 2082  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
03 Aug 2082  –  Uranus at opposition
19 Oct 2082  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
22 May 2083  –  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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