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 25.4 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 22 days old.

From Hackensack , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:21 (EDT) – 3 hours and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 03:55.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8; 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 23h19m20s 5°39'S Aquarius -11.8 29'48"5
Uranus 23h18m50s 5°15'S Aquarius 5.9 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 88° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:26
Twilight begins
04:20


Waning Crescent

23%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 11:15 17:18
Venus 04:25 10:31 16:37
Moon 03:57 09:16 14:45
Mars 11:41 19:06 02:30
Jupiter 08:33 16:02 23:31
Saturn 04:47 10:39 16:31
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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10 Sep 2091  –  Uranus at opposition
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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