The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 55.9 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 15 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible between 21:41 and 03:38. They will become accessible at around 21:41, when they rise to an altitude of 20° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:39, 34° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 03:38 when they sink below 20° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Uranus will be at mag 5.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 176° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 20 May 2024

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.

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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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