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 7.2 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 26 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h12m10s 5°47'S Aquarius -10.1 29'31"9
Uranus 23h12m20s 5°54'S Aquarius 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jan 2026

The sky on 11 January 2026
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
17:01
Twilight ends
18:30
Twilight begins
05:27


Waning Crescent

31%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:40 11:33 16:26
Venus 07:06 12:04 17:02
Moon 00:54 06:18 11:36
Mars 06:59 11:56 16:53
Jupiter 16:42 23:49 06:57
Saturn 10:23 16:16 22:10
All times shown in PST.

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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24 Nov 2091  –  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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