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 57.0 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 8 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:41 (PDT), 37° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:17.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h03m50s 18°27'S Capricornus -11.6 30'12"2
Uranus 21h03m00s 17°31'S Capricornus 5.8 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Aug 2026

The sky on 8 August 2026
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:46
Twilight ends
21:19
Twilight begins
04:32


Waning Crescent

14%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:43 11:44 18:45
Venus 09:47 15:47 21:46
Moon 01:20 08:58 16:37
Mars 02:22 09:34 16:46
Jupiter 05:30 12:26 19:22
Saturn 22:29 04:40 10:52
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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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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