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 58.1 arcminutes of each other. 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 18° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h11m40s 13°46'S Virgo -10.1 32'26"8
Uranus 14h12m40s 12°50'S Virgo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Jul 2026

The sky on 21 July 2026
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
04:13


Waxing Gibbous

60%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:07 12:01 18:55
Venus 09:28 15:51 22:14
Moon 13:43 19:00 00:11
Mars 02:43 09:52 17:00
Jupiter 06:22 13:20 20:19
Saturn 23:39 05:51 12:03
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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12 Feb 2144  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
26 Apr 2144  –  Uranus at opposition
13 Jul 2144  –  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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