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 Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 59.5 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 11 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 22:29 (EST), 34° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 02:51.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.4; 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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 14h24m40s 12°51'S Libra -12.4 32'37"7
Uranus 14h23m40s 13°48'S Libra 5.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 122° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
17:10
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:47

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

44%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:15 13:45 18:15
Venus 10:48 15:18 19:49
Moon 22:59 06:12 13:13
Mars 21:34 04:54 12:13
Jupiter 18:09 01:32 08:56
Saturn 13:47 19:20 00:53
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

30 Apr 1977  –  Uranus at opposition
16 Jul 1977  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
19 Feb 1978  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
05 May 1978  –  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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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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