The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 33.6 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 25 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:01 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 31° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:04.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h37m40s 22°33'N Gemini -10.7 30'11"1
Uranus 07h37m10s 22°00'N Gemini 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 49° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:03

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:33 12:55 17:17
Venus 10:09 14:32 18:54
Moon 23:09 06:06 12:50
Mars 20:36 04:03 11:30
Jupiter 17:09 00:40 08:11
Saturn 12:58 18:29 23:59
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

22 Mar 1953  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
29 Oct 1953  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
11 Jan 1954  –  Uranus at opposition
27 Mar 1954  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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