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 41.5 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 17 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:45, when they reach an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:25, 43° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 04:26, 41° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h17m50s 6°08'S Aquarius -12.4 30'03"6
Uranus 23h17m00s 5°29'S Aquarius 5.8 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 141° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Nov 2024

The sky on 27 November 2024
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
16:25
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:14


Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:19 12:49 17:19
Venus 10:16 14:45 19:15
Moon 03:23 08:52 14:13
Mars 20:35 03:58 11:22
Jupiter 17:04 00:31 07:58
Saturn 12:50 18:22 23:54
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

24 Jun 2091  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
10 Sep 2091  –  Uranus at opposition
24 Nov 2091  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
27 Jun 2092  –  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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