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 12.6 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 11 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 21:07 (PDT), 43° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:31, 43° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:07, when they sink below 20° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Uranus will be at mag 5.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h06m20s 12°30'S Virgo -12.5 32'41"9
Uranus 14h06m40s 12°17'S Virgo 5.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 133° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Jul 2026

The sky on 22 July 2026
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
04:14


Waxing Gibbous

65%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 11:57 18:51
Venus 09:29 15:51 22:13
Moon 14:43 19:46 00:44
Mars 02:42 09:51 17:00
Jupiter 06:19 13:17 20:16
Saturn 23:35 05:47 11:59
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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16 Feb 2145  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
01 May 2145  –  Uranus at opposition

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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