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 1°00' 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 Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 13° above the horizon at dawn.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 21h14m10s 15°37'S Capricornus -11.3 31'06"2
Uranus 21h15m10s 16°37'S Capricornus 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 64° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2024

The sky on 16 June 2024
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:08

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

78%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:24 13:02 20:40
Venus 05:32 13:06 20:40
Moon 15:13 20:47 02:11
Mars 02:38 09:24 16:11
Jupiter 04:03 11:22 18:42
Saturn 00:53 06:34 12:16
All times shown in EDT.

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

18 Oct 1998  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
21 May 1999  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
07 Aug 1999  –  Uranus at opposition
23 Oct 1999  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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